THE iRANGE 
I KNOW 



Vinifred Stephais 







PRKSENTliD IJY 



THE FRANCE I KNOW 




M. Anatole France as he is today 



THE FRANCE I KNOW 



BY 

IM^ WINIFRED STEPHENS )'V^^-* 



AVTHOB or "THS LIFB OF IfADAMB ADAlf, VfO. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Published, 1919, 
By E. p. DUTTON & COMPANY 



AU Rights Reserved \ / a n 






001-9 131? ' 



Printed In the United States of America 






TO 
MY FRIEND 

MADAME MENARD DORIAN 

WHO EIAS INSPIRED MANY OF 
THESE PAGES 



FOREWORD 

This book tells among other things of seven 
visits to France in War-time: three in the winter, 
spring, and summer of 1915, two in 1916, one in 
the autumn of 1917, and one in the spring of 1918. 
It recalls some passages in past French history 
suggested by this intermittent observation of the 
present, and — rashly perhaps — it endeavours to 
forecast certain phases of French national develop- 
ment after the War. 

It will be found that, in dealing with Anglo- 
French relations, differences of temperament, 
opinion, and general attitude towards life are not 
ignored. They are referred to chiefly in order to 
show how marvellous has been the concord between 
two nations so diverse and so long separated in the 
past by rivalry and hostility. Their mutual for- 
bearance and charity in circumstances which must 
have often strained those virtues almost to breaking 
point reflect the highest credit on both allies. Well 
do they augur for the fulfilment after this War of 
the wish Shakespeare put into the mouth of a 
French Queen at the close of an earlier conflict, 



Vlll FOREWORD 

terminated by the marria^-e of an English King 
with a French Princess — 

"God, the best Maker of all marriages, 
Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one! 
As man and wife, being two, are one in love. 
So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal. 
That never may ill office, or fell jealousy , . . 
Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms 
To make divorce of their incorporate league; 
That English may as French, French Englishmen, 
Receive each other! — God speak this Amen!" 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAQB 

I. OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 1 

II. FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES . . 15 

III. WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE . 35 

IV. AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARNE . . 48 
V. WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 54 

VI. TALKS BY THE WAY 62 

Vll. THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY . . 83 

Vin. yN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS . • * \. . 95 

IX. POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 117 

X. RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 132 

XI. A NEW FRANCE 144 

XII. woman's position IN FRANCE 169 

XIII. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 178 

XIV. THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC AND THE FRENCH- 

WOMAN'S WAR-WORK 208 

XV. THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 228 

INDEX 249 



IX 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

M. ANATOLE FRANCE AS HE IS TO-DAY . . . FrOfltispiece 

FACINQ 
FAGB 

MADAME ADAM AS A YOUNG WOMAN 10 

M. PAUL BOURGET 36 

M. HENRI BERGSON 114 

AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF M. ANATOLE FRANCE IN HIS 

STUDY 138 

M. RENE] BAZIN . 158 

GEORGE SAND 182 

M. MAURICE BARRES 212 



THE FRANCE I KNOW 



CHAPTER r 

OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 

The War has brought to many of us brutal 
awakenings from too sanguine dreams of human 
progress. It has also brought us visions of fair 
human qualities never suspected before. But it 
has not yet completely taught us to know France; 
though it is teaching the French to know them- 
selves. *'To think," writes a popular French 
author, "that people believed us to be, and that we 
believed ourselves to be, light minded! On the 
contrary, we are almost too serious." 

There have been Frenchmen, however, who did 
not need the War to reveal to them the true serious- 
ness of the national character. Seriousness of 
conviction was for Jean Jaures one of the funda- 
mental characteristics of his race. 

Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent leger, 

cried Charles Peguy. 

^ To the courtesy of the Editor of "Land and Water," in 
which this chapter first appeared, I am indebted for permission 
to reproduce it here. 

1 



2 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Parce que tu es un peuple prampt . . . 

Mais moi, je t'ai pese, dit Dieu, et je ne t'ai point trouve 
leger. 

But we English, after years of comradeship, 
while we admire the gallantry and heroism of our 
Allies still find it difficult to regard them as essen- 
tially serious. An English lawyer, settled in Cana- 
da, whom I used to think intelligent, writes to me 
that he found Paris "vicious and materialistic. 
French hterature neither elevating nor instructive 
and much of it puerile." Then he adds a sentence 
which may explain, if not excuse, his error: "Out 
here we have French both from France and 
Canadian born, and there are some charming people 
among them; but we don't mix much. There is a 
difference. They are clever and tasty in many 
ways, but seem lacking in that vision or idealism, 
or whatever it is, that makes the average Anglo- 
Saxon strive more or less for better things." 

Here persists the age-old prejudice, arising 
doubtless from long centuries of military warfare 
and commercial rivalry, proceeding also, as we 
shall show, from our own and from the French 
national temperament; and not unconnected with 
the intrigues of our common enemy. 

Our British insularity blinds us. It renders us 
almost as incapable of grasping the psychology of 



OUR BLUNDEH ABOUT FRANCE 3 

other people as the German, whose dullness in this 
respect we are so fond of decrying. We are too 
prone to judge everything by British standards, to 
adopt a Podsnapian attitude and to condemn 
wholesale all that does not exactly correspond with 
the ideas prevailing in these northern islands. "Not 
until we have ceased to urge our schemes of moral- 
ity or our habits of thought on our charming and 
beloved neighbours," writes Mr. Edmund Gosse, 
"can we regard the Entente as not merely cordial 
but complete." 

Nevertheless, in mitigation of our error, it must 
be admitted that the French people are not easy 
to know. And we have been content with a super- 
ficial acquaintance, based for the most part on 
what we have seen on the Paris boulevards, read in 
the latest French novel,^ or witnessed on the boards 
of some Paris theatre. When on such trivial, su- 
perficial evidence we ventured to pass sentence on 
a whole nation we were no better than the man who 
tried to sell his house by producing a sample brick 
from his pocket. 

How should we in England like our nation to 
be judged from what goes on in Piccadilly, from 

^ See G. Rudler, Professor of French Literature at the 
University of London, on la Moralite de la Litterature Fran- 
gaise, a lecture delivered to the Anglo-French Society in Lon- 
don, published (1918) by *'le Fran9ais." 



4 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

the shady side of life dwelt on in soiie popular 
novel, from the dramas on the stage of some second- 
rate theatre? 

Moreover, in judging any nation we shall inevi- 
tably go astray if we consider it merely from the 
metropolitan point of view. Life in great metro- 
politan cities — whether Paris, London, New York, 
Vienna, or Berlin — is not only more or less identi- 
cal, but it is totally unrepresentative of the life of 
either the French, British, American, Austrian, or 
Prussian nation as a whole. 

One of the English writers who has best under- 
stood certain phases of French life is Mr. J. E. C. 
Bodley. How did this eminent student of French 
manners and institutions prepare himself for his 
book on France? Did he content himself with a 
study of Paris? No, he travelled ceaselessly up 
and down the Provinces, from Marseilles to Bor- 
deaux, from Concarneau to Lyons, from Toulouse 
to Lille. And when, having collected his material, 
he settled down to write, instead of establishing 
himself in Paris, he took up his abode in a country 
chateau. Other writers, to whom France has re- 
vealed her heart, Gilbert Hamerton, Mme. Du- 
claux, for example, have not neglected the prov- 
inces. For through French provincial life runs the 



OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 5 

main stream of French national characteristics and 
tendencies. I have always been glad that my par- 
ents sent me to school, not to some fashionable 
Parisian pensionnat, but to Protestant Provence. 

In that remote Cevennes community, an English 
girl was a curiosity. And as such she was brought 
down into the salon in the evening when on high 
days and holidays friends came and China tea with 
its delicate perfume was handed round, and punch 
was brewed in a great silver bowl, stirred with a 
long-handled silver spoon. She was taken by 
Monsieur and Madame to similar functions in the 
houses of relatives and friends. And it was in these 
simple social gatherings that she learnt to appre- 
ciate the cultured salon life, driven out of fashion- 
able Paris by American restlessness and passion 
for card-playing. There she was first initiated into 
that intimate family circle, which we English have 
too often believed to be non-existent in France. 

Si vous jmrlez de la famille franfaise a un 
etr anger meme bienveillant, writes Rene Bazin, 
vous apercevreZj a ses paroles, a son sourire ou a 
son silence, quil croit a la famille allemande, a la 
famille anglaise, peut-etre meme a la famille 
americaine, mais qti'l ve croit pas qu'il eooiste encore 
line famille franfaise. "Nevertheless," he con- 



6 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

tinues, "nowhere is the family more united and 
more affectionate than in France." ^ 

In this circle the young English girl heard freely 
discussed fundamental questions which Anglo- 
Saxon shyness, to call it by its most charitable 
name, causes to be tabooed in British drawing- 
rooms. Occasionally, when it was proposed to read 
aloud so:r.e rather advanced play, or to discuss some 
progressive book, the youthfulness of 3Iees might 
be called in question. But the touchstone was: 
"Have you read Shakespeare?" And her affirma- 
tive reply banished all misgivings. If 3Iees had 
read Shakespeare, then she might read anything, 
discuss anything. 3Iees refrained from explaining 
that her knowledge of her great national poet had 
been gained from the well-expurgated Clarendon 
Press Edition. Indeed at that time she had proba- 
bly never even heard of the estimable Mr. Bowdler. 

Seldom, however, did such questions arise; for 
the favourite entertainments were the reading 
aloud by a granddaughter of Guizot of some new 
poem, or the declaiming by the Pastor, with all the 
gusto of his Gascon exuberance, of some classic 
scene from Moliere. 

Such tranquil, cultured existences, however, were 
not confined to the provinces. Even in Paris, down 

^"Echo de Paris/' August 22, 1915. 



OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 7 

to the very eve of the War in quarters remote from 
the noise and glitter of the boulevards, far from the 
fashionable Champs Elysees or Pare Monceau, 
away in some side street on the left bank or out 
beyond the Luxembourg Gardens, ihere were 
hundreds of salons like those I have described. In 
one of them only a few weeks before the mobilisa- 
tion I heard a young historian read his introduction 
to a work that would have created a sensation in 
the academic world had not the author's call to 
the trenches intervened to prevent its completion. 

But well concealed were these sequestered lives 
of people who loved things of the mind from the 
throngs of British tourists who flocked over to 
France for a gay week-end, or spent a few crowded 
days in Paris en route for Switzerland or Italy, 
and who returned to their native islands with a sense 
of superiority, not unmingled with secret rehsh at 
having witnessed, if not participated in, the fri- 
volity of modern Babylon. 

Nevertheless, for the prevailing belief in French 
decadence we have not only ourselves to blame; 
the French, as we have said, were partly respon- 
sible.^ They perhaps more than any other race, 
more even than ourselves — and we are not im- 

^ See la Troisieme France, by Victor Giraud (Hachette, 
1917), pp. 11, 12, IS. 



8 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

mune from such a weakness — are addicted to self- 
depreciation. The reason for this is not far to seek. 
They are essentially of a logical temperament. And 
it is this quality which makes them face the worst 
of everything. In personal matters they may be 
tempted to veil truths for the sake of politeness, 
but in questions of principle their intellectual sin- 
cerity is uncompromising. They are fearlessly hon- 
est thinkers, and so averse from comfortable self- 
delusion that they take a sort of bitter pleasure in 
believing the worst. 

We English, a sentimental, poetical race, are 
content to dwell in a more or less cloudy intellec- 
tual sphere. When we depreciate ourselves it is 
through inverted pride, not through our logical 
temperament or fondness for reality. We are in- 
clined to run away from facts. In our literature 
we like things to be represented not as they are, but 
as they should be. We skim and film the ulcerous 
part. We have our realists, but even they are not 
as frankly and vividly realistic as their literary 
brethren across the Channel. We have never had 
a Zola. He was so convinced of the importance of 
concealing nothing that he insisted on fixing with 
his microscopic eye and in photographing with 
his consummate literary art those dregs of society 
which Anglo-Saxons are so careful to ignore. Zola 



OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 9 

of set purpose constituted himself the man with the 
muck-rake. And by riveting his readers' attention 
on the foul spots, which defile, not only French, but 
every form of our so-called "modern civilisation," 
he created an impression that his country was rotten 
to the core. Xevertheless Zola was a high-minded 
man. His object in the twenty volumes of Les 
Rougon INIacquart series was to reform society by 
revealing its depravity. 

JNIany of Zola's contemporaries realised the dis- 
astrous effect that his novels would produce abroad. 
Mme. Adam (Juliette Lamber) writes in her Sou- 
venirs: "One's gorge rises as one reads his pages. 
Not only is he a danger for French morality, but 
he serves our enemies better than any of their paid 
agents. IMore than any of our authors he is read 
abroad, where his writings are cited to prove our 
degeneracy proclaimed by one of our greatest 
writers." 

It was not in England alone that this myth of 
French degeneracy was credited. In Germany the 
pernicious seed fell upon fruitful soil. The Pan- 
Germans, puffed up by their victory over France, 
were glad to attribute her defeat to her moral in- 
feriority. France was hopelessly decadent, they 
proudly affirmed, and not France alone, but the 
whole Latin race. It was imperative, therefore, 



10 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

that for the world's welfare Latin chdlisation should 
be superseded by Teutonic Kultur, 

According to these arrogant supermen, it was 
the women of France who were chiefly responsible 
for the degeneracy of the French race. On the 
Frenchwomen, to whose industry, frugality and 
courage not France only, but the whole Allied 
cause is so deeply indebted, the Pail-Germans laid 
the chief blame for French decadence. 

Frenchwo: :en themselves were painfully con- 
scious of the unjust indictment that was being 
brought against them. And now for the credit of 
France they have deemed it necessary to rehabili- 
tate themselves in the eyes of the world. For this 
purpose they have, during this War, organised a 
movement, which is known as la Croisade des 
Femmes frarifaises. 

Led by some of the most distinguished of their 
compatriots (Mme. Poincare, la Duchesse d'Uzes, 
Mme. Adam, Mme. Alphonse Daudet), the Cru- 
saders appeal to women throughout France to 
make known in the world what Frenchwomen really 
are, what they have done and are doing in this 
War. They describe in their manifesto how women 
of all classes have combined for national service, 
how all distinctions of rank and creed have van- 
ished, how in their nurse's costume, their last year's 




Madame Adam as a young woman 



OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 11 

tailor-made, or, alas! too often in their widow's 
weeds, they labour side by side for the national 
cause. ''We are all here," they cry, "all except one: 
that doll without heart, without morals, without 
courage, that creature of pleasure, of coquetry, of 
perdition. Where is she?" they ask. "We cannot 
find her, she is not here, she was but the invention 
of our enemy's jealousy." 

But so diligently did the Teutons before the War 
promulgate this fiction of French decadence that 
we find in France itself certain writers beginning 
to believe it. France dying. La France qui meurt 
was the ominous title of a book (by M. Alcide 
Ebray) published in 1910. About the same time 
the academician, the late M. Emile Faguet, in 
a series of volumes, was mourning over his coun- 
try's lack of initiative, enterprise, and will power. 

The depressing effect of this pessimistic view of 
France may even be traced during the first two 
weeks of the War. Many of the intellectual young 
Frenchmen, who in those August days went forth 
to fight for their country, believed, as Renan had 
believed in 1870, that France was on her death-bed. 
With their hearts overclouded by the shadow of 
the 1870 defeat, they were convinced that the Ger- 
mans would march swiftly into Paris, and thence 
overrun the whole of France. The German boast 



12 THE FRANCE I KNOA\^ 

of "in three weeks in Paris, in three months in Lon- 
don, in three years in Xew York" did not seem to 
them entirely without reason. 

"I saw the terrible siege of 1871," wrote a 
Frenchman at the end of July, 1914. "Am I again 
about to experience the horror of beholding the 
Germans in the suburbs of our capital? How will 
Paris behave faced by the menace of war? Will 
the socialists revolt? Shall we have a general strike? 
Will the working classes refuse to mobilise as they 
have so often threatened? Will the Revolutionary 
party deliver us without a blow into the hands of 
the German, while our Russian and English Allies 
helplessly look on at our death agony?" ^ 

The perfection of German military organisation 
was well known in France. And the French real- 
ised they were not ready. Every one was saying: 
"Why, the German army will devour the French 
army in one mouthful." ^ Not without foundation 
appeared the bragging of the "Berliner Tage- 
blatt": "Poor little Frenchmen, we are going to 
break every bone in your little bodies." And until 
the battle of the JNIarne misgivings continued to 
overcloud the horizon of many patriotic French- 

^ Georges Ohnet, Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris pendant 
la guerre de 191Jf. Fascicule I, p. 9. 
2 Ihid., p. 49. 



OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 13 

men. But the brilliant defence of the capital, the 
glorious victory on the banks of the Ourcq, the sud- 
den volte-face of the invading army saved Paris 
and saved France. Henceforth French hearts were 
filled with confidence, assured of ultimate triumph. 

But Frenchmen need not have despaired. A 
glance at the history of the French nation would 
have shown them that France has ever been the 
land of reawakenings and recommencements. "No 
sooner do her enemies believe her to be dying, and 
full of hatred and glee, rush to bury her corpse, 
than she arises all aglow with life and vigour from 
her death-bed, and brandishing her sword she cries : 
'Here I r.m, behold me, young like Joan of Arc, 
like the great Conde at Rocroi, like Marceau the 
Republican, like General Buonaparte.' " ^ 

There is no better school of optimism than the 
history of the French nation. Hopefulness has well 
been called the "Dauphin of France." 

For his heart to thrill with hope and confidence 
in the future the Frenchman need only carry his 
mind back to his country conquered and occupied 
by the English, then delivered by Joan of Arc; to 
his nation distracted by civil strife, torn asunder by 
religious disputes, then united and made prosper- 
ous by Henri Quatre ; to his land a prey to factions 

^ Maurice Barres, I'Union Sacree, p. 76. 



14 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

of the nobility, laid waste with fire and sword, then 
blossoming into all the glories of le Grand Siecle. 
He has only to remember the menace from foreign 
powers successfully averted during the Revolution, 
the humiliation, the dismemberment, the civil war 
of 1871, succeeded by the magnificent recovery of 
the last forty years. 

If he thinks of these things, no Frenchman can 
fail to assent to Gambetta's words, uttered in the 
darkest hour of defeat: "No, it is impossible for the 
spirit of France to be overcast for ever." 

Especially may he take courage when he consid- 
ers the part played by France in the present War; 
when he sees the unity and patriotism of the mobil- 
isation days even surpassed by the tenacity, the 
fortitude, the heroic energy, the valour displayed 
throughout four years of war; when in the future 
he shall carry his mind back to this blessed day on 
which I write, which brings the news of Marshal 
Foch's glorious counter-attack and the French re- 
capture of Soissons. 



CHAPTER II 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES ^ 



What is patriotism? The question is almost as 
difficult to answer as that historic inquiry, What is 
truth ? We hear frequently of the real and the un- 
real patriotism. And every modern State includes 
parties, each of which arrogates to itself the title 
of the only real patriots, and describes as the only 
real patriotism its own political programme, de- 
nouncing as unpatriotic all those who refuse to ac- 
cept it. In France there are many types of patriot- 
ism, but mainly two: the nationalist type and the 
cosmopolitan. For I hope here to show that though 
cosmopolitanism may be anti-patriotic, there exists 
a patriotism not inconsistent with cosmopolitan 
ideals. On ne sert efficacement la republique tmi- 
verselle qv/en servant d'ahord la sienne, writes M. 
Alfred Loisy.^ 

The meaning of the term patriotism varies not 

^ The courtesy of the Editor of "The Fortnightly Review" 
permits me here to reproduce an article which appeared in 
that publication in September, 191 6. 

^Guerre et Religion, p. 107. 

15 



16 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

only as between party and party, but from age to 
age. Joan of Arc, the incarnation of patriotism, 
probably never heard the word patriotisme and its 
root patrie. Where the modern Frenchman would 
employ the term patrie, Joan spoke of le royaume 
de France, And it was la pitie quil y avait au 
royaume de France which inspired her heroic mis- 
sion. "Isabelle Romee's daughter," writes Anatole 
France,^ "had no more notion of la patrie as it is 
conceived to-day than she had of the idea of landed 
property which lies at its base. That is something 
quite modern. But Joan did conceive of the heri- 
tage of kings and of the demesne of the House of 
France. And it was there, in that demesne and in 
that heritage, that the French gathered together 
before forming themselves into la patrief' 

''To a man of the Middle Ages," writes Wester- 
marck,^ " 'his country' meant little more than the 
neighbourhood in which he lived. Kingdoms ex- 
isted, but no nations. The first duty of a vassal was 
to be loyal to his lord." 

It was in or about Joan's own time that the word 
patrie was first coined. I believe it was first used 
by Joan's contemporary, Jean Chartier, historiog- 
rapher to the Dauphin who, having been crowned 

^ La Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, Introduction, pp. Ixiv-lxv. 

^ Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, II, p. 180. 



FRENCH PxiTRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 17 

by the JMaid became King Charles VII. But the 
term was long regarded as somewhat fantastic. 
When Joachim du Bellay, a century later, em- 
ployed it in his Defense et Illustration de la Langue 
franfaise, he was condemned for using a newfan- 
gled expression which was quite unnecessary when 
the French language possessed such a good word 
as pays. Qui a pais na que faire de patrie, wrote 
one of du Bellay's critics, Charles Fontaine. But 
— pace Charles Fontaine — pays and patrie are not 
exact equivalents. For, as Hamerton, in his book, 
French and English,^ points out, patrie is never 
employed for common purposes; it always has an 
emotional significance. Pays, or country, may be 
used in cold blood, as when a Minister appeals to 
the country by a general election, or a huntsman 
rides across country, or a gentleman resides in the 
country or is a country squire. The word cam- 
pagne may also be used in this connection, but not 
patrie; that w^ord never stands for anything but 
the land we should be ready to die for. It is an ex- 
pression which in a time of national strain like the 
present often brings tears to the eyes. "What a 
little thing in comparison with la patrie is one's 
own life when one comes to think of it," said a 
working man during the siege of Paris, and in such 

^ Page 75. 



18 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

a connection no word save patrie could have served ; 
none other could have conveyed such an impres- 
sion of fervour and devotion. 

In its power of appealing to the emotions, only- 
one other word in the French language is worthy to 
be ranked with patrie. That other word is mere, 
mother. And the two words have more than this 
in common. For patrie, with its derivation fro:n 
pater, suggests family ties and family affection. 
We notice in passing that persons who, like Mr. 
Bernard Shaw, pride themselves on having out- 
grown so primitive and crude a sentiment as that 
of family solidarity are also pleased to think that 
they have outgrown patriotism. 

The patriotic sentiment in France is essentially 
an extension of family affection. La patrie is 
loved as a mother, with a passionate and personal 
adoration. And the circumstance that by her geo- 
graphical position, through the weakness of her 
north-eastern frontier, la patrie has been so often 
assailed and invaded, endears her all the more to 
her children. Multitudes of examples of the 
Frenchman's filial attitude towards la patrie are 
afforded by the present War. 

Referring to the mobilisation of August, 1914, 
a Frenchman said to me, unconsciously perhaps 
reproducing almost word for word Theophile Gau- 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 19 

tier's famous mot in 1870:^ "When the Bodies in- 
vaded our territory it was as if our mother were be- 
ing beaten, and all her children flocked to deliver 
her." 

On a glorious summer day in that same August, 
travelling through the fields of France, white unto 
the harvest, past orchards laden with mellow fruit- 
fulness, was a train filled with French soldiers. 
They were on their way to join their regiment. 
Looking from the carriage window one of them 
exclaimed: "Yes, France is so beautiful that she 
is well worth dying for." 

Mme. Adam (Juliette Lamber) , one of the most 
ardent of French patriots, told me that she was 
pitying her grandson, who has since died on the 
battlefield, for having been summoned to the Front 
so suddenly that he had no time to go and bid fare- 
well to his wife and child in another part of the 
country. "Don't pity me too much, grand'meref' 
he said; "I love my wife and child dearly, but I love 
France more." 

A father, on hearing of the death of his son in 
the Argonne, said to his wife: "We cannot give 
to God and to France any offering purer, nobler, 
more beautiful than this child." 

In truth, this personal note in the Frenchman's 

^ On hat maman: j*accaurs. 



20 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

love of his country was sounded early in French 
history, even before the actual word patriotisme 
had been invented. The seventeenth-century poet 
Chapelain, in his epic on Joan of Arc, la PuceUe, 
ou France Delivree, wrote of la patrie as "the com- 
mon mother of Frenchmen," and "a mother who 
has need of all her children." Three 3?'ears after 
Chapelain, Corneille took this jewel of a word and 
set it in the crown of his tragedy CEdipe, 

Thus enshrined, patrie began to bear fruit and 
multiply. In the next century the encyclopaedists 
gave it two children — the derivatives, patriate and 
patriotisme. Now this triad of words was com- 
plete ; it was ready for the part it was to play dur- 
ing the French Revolution; it was ready to be the 
clarion cry of the sansculottes, who, shouting Vive 
la patrie!, charged Brunswick's invading army; it 
was ready for the patriot knitters (les tricoteuses) ; 
it was ready for that howling, red-capped, carma- 
gnole dancing mob which burst into the Tuileries 
and for the old cry of Vive le roil substituted that of 
Vive la nation!; it was ready for those patriots who, 
at the King's trial, growled like angry dogs for 
fear some Girondin or Jesuit should snatch their 
royal victim from their clutches. 

"O Patriotism, what crimes have been committed 
in thy name!" we exclaim, slightly varying the 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 21 

words of one of those very patriots when her turn 
came to mount the scaffold. 

But it is obvious that for the minds of French- 
men during the Revolution the words patrie and 
patriotisme had a meaning very different from 
that which they had implied earlier. For this change 
the King and Queen were largely responsible. 
When they were found to be plotting with for- 
eign Powers for the invasion of France, in order 
to prop up against the will of the nation a tottering 
and discredited monarchy, a feeling arose entirely 
new to French hearts and intellects. It was now 
that la patrie came to have a definite existence apart 
from the sovereign. Patriotism came to be so com- 
pletely dissociated from royalty that in Robes- 
pierre's words, "the King had to die in order that 
la patrie might live." 

While shorn of one of its meanings, the word 
patrie, during the Revolution, gained another. 
Throughout the eighteenth centur^^ there had grad- 
ually been extended to all ranks of the French na- 
tion the right, hitherto reserved to the aristocracy, 
of holding landed property. And large numbers 
of French peasants had been availing themselves of 
this new privilege. La patrie, as a French writer 
has put it, "was becoming divided up among her 
citizens." And there began to burn in the hearts of 



22 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

the peasant proprietors that passionate love of the 
actual soil of la patrie, that land hunger which has 
ever since been so marked a characteristic of the 
French nation. But with the right to possess the 
soil came also the duty of defending it. The peas- 
ant proprietor became a patriot soldier. Joan had 
fought for France because it was her King's coun- 
try, a land of which her Prince had been robbed; 
the sansculotte fought for la patrie because it was 
his own possession. Thus by the time of the Hevo- 
lution in the patriotism of France there were al- 
ready three dominant notes: (1) love of la patrie 
as the common mother, to which all Frenchmen are 
attached by the bonds of an ardent affection; (2) 
the possession of la patrie as the inheritance of 
every Frenchman; (3) the duty of defending la 
patrie from foreign aggression. Moreover, the ne- 
cessity of guarding la patrie tended to render the 
patriot suspicious of all who were outside it, espe- 
cially of those foreigners, notably the English on 
the one hand, the Germans on the other, who most 
threatened it. Pitt and Coburg were ever the bo- 
gies of these Revolutionists. This type of French 
patriot inclined to agree with our own Dr. John- 
son, and to regard every foreigner as a fool, if not a 
knave. 

That was what we now call the nationalist or 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 23 

Chauvinist type of patriot. Nationalism entrenches 
itself behind frontiers, and where natural frontiers 
do not exist, as in the north-east of France, it raises 
strong fortifications. 

But throughout the eighteenth century, side by 
side with patriotism of this nationalist type, there 
was growing a sentiment of a very different kind, 
but one equally typical of the Revolution period. 
This was the cosmopolitanism which was blind to 
any distinction between the cause of France and 
that of mankind, which reached out across frontiers 
to a conception of the brotherhood of humanity. 
Voltaire deplored that patriotism too often makes 
us the enemies of our fellow-men. Other emanci- 
pated Frenchmen of that time dreamed of being 
citizens of every nation, and of not belonging to 
one's native country alone. As Frenchmen their 
ideal was "to be the motive power of progress, the 
organ of civilisation, pillars of the human race, citi- 
zens of the world." Many patriots of the Revolu- 
tion were possessed by this idea. It found expres- 
sion when the Legislative Assembly, opening the 
ranks of French citizenship to distinguished for- 
eigners, naturalised Klopstock, Jeremy Bentham, 
and Tom Paine, and when Baron Clootz, with what 
Carlyle calls "his babble of a universal republic," 
claimed and was granted seats for his bizarre rep- 



24 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

resentatives of the human species at the Fete of the 
Federation. Both types of patriots, nationalist 
and internationalist, were represented in Napo- 
leon's armies and at a later date in the French Par- 
liament. There not infrequently they came into 
conflict. Opposition, during a debate on army re- 
form, said to ]\Iarshal Niel: "You want to turn 
France into barracks," and the Marshal retorted, 
"And you must take care you don't turn her into 
a cemetery." 

The gulf between these two patriotisms was wid- 
ened by the Franco-Prussian War. After the 
loss of Alsace-Lorraine the nationalists became Re- 
vanchards. They clamoured, at any cost, to re- 
gain the lost provinces; while the internationalists 
acquiesced in the loss, and turned their attention 
elsewhere, either to what they called La Revanche 
Intellectuelle or to the building up of a great colo- 
nial empire beyond the seas. 

The Government of France has never been revan- 
chard. Since 1870 French Ministers have been 
more or less inspired by the internationalist ideal. 
And there is little doubt that in the Young France 
of the last three decades of the nineteenth century 
internationalist and pacifist ideas were the vogue. 
Tolstoy was widely read. Cos :iopolitanism was 
growing and Pacifism of an extreme anti-militarist 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 25 

type was not uncommon. "What is la patrie?'^ a 
pacifist working man is said to have asked a soldier. 
^^La patrie" replied the soldier, "is killing Prus- 
sians." "Then down with la patrieT was the paci- 
fist's retort. Incited by this anti-patriotic attitude, 
nationalists became more and more extreme and 
demonstrative. They grouped themselves under 
Paul Deroulede into the Chauvinist League of Pa- 
triots. These leaguers, in order to win public opin- 
ion to their side and to seize the Government, did 
not hesitate to resort to violence; they engineered 
the Boulangist movement and its continuation, the 
anti-Dreyfusard campaign. Their efforts in a meas- 
ure n:et with success. For at the opening of the 
twentieth century nationalism seemed to be gaining 
ground in France. The growth of this aggressive 
patriotism was furthered by three causes : two rath- 
er subtle and limited in their action; the last per- 
fectly obvious and far-reaching. 

The first was the issue of the Dreyfus affair. 
That famous lawsuit had divided France into two 
camps, arraying on the one hand nationalists, anti- 
Dreyfusards, whose watchword was "My country, 
right or WTong," "My country above everything" 
(Frankreich uber alles) , and over against them the 
cosmopolitans, the humanitarians, the Dreyfusards, 



26 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

who cried: "Justice, humanity, truth above every- 
thing." 

No one was more disgusted with the issue of the 
Dreyfus alfair than the more thoughtful Dreyfus- 
ards. For the lawsuit, as we remember, ended in 
a compromise. Dreyfus was pardoned for an of- 
fence he had never committed. And to the intel- 
lectual Frenchman nothing is more abhorrent than 
a compromise. 

To devout souls, like Charles Peguy and Daniel 
Halevy, for whom Dreyfusism had been a religion, 
this compromise was absolutely loathsome. It 
seemed to them merely engineered by politicians, 
who were eager to grasp at the loaves and fishes 
of offices which it brought within their reach. More 
worthy of respect to that ardent intelligentsia 
seemed even the irreconcilable attitude of the anti- 
Dreyfusards. And henceforth some of the irrecon- 
cilable Dreyfusards began to evince a certain sym- 
pathy with their former foes, with nationalist n:ove- 
ment which the anti-Dreyfusards were promoting, 
and even with nationalist leaders like Paul Derou- 
lede and Maurice Barres, who, after Deroulede's 
death, succeeded him as President of the League of 
Patriots. From the support of these disappointed 
intellectuals nationalism sucked no small advan- 
tage. From another movement also it was gaining 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 27 

strength. Nationalism in France has always been 
closely associated with Catholicism. And the 
Catholic revival, which set in about the beginning 
of the century, was at once a cause and an effect 
of the growth of nationalism. Into the origins of 
the revival I cannot here enter at any length.^ But 
we may notice that a number of Dreyfusard free- 
thinkers were driven into the arms of the Church 
when their fellow-Dreyfusards, such as M. Combes, 
while posing as champions of liberty, began to at- 
tack Catholic institutions. Nationalist Catholic 
converts pleaded their nationalism as the ground 
for their adherence to the religion of their country. 
"Every truly patriotic Frenchman must be a Cath- 
olic," said a nationalist to me the other day, "just 
as every patriotic Turk must be a Mussulman." 

But more pronounced and wider in its effect than 
either the issue of the Dreyfus campaign or the 
Catholic revival was another cause of the growth 
of nationalism. That cause v/as the attitude which 
Germany began to assume towards France when, 
after 1890, William II took over from Bismarck 
the control of German foreign politics. 

To French patriots of the nationalist type it 

^ See French Novelists of To-day (second series), "Intro- 
duction/' by Winifred Stephens. (London and New York: 
John Lane.) 



28 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

seemed that la patrie was more than ever in danger. 
During the last two decades of the nineteenth cen- 
tury France, as we all know, had with marvellous 
rapidity built up for hers^elf a great colonial em- 
pire. It had largely been by the instigation or en- 
couragement of Bismarck that she had done this. 
"Let France go to Tunis, let her go to Morocco," 
said Bismarck; "it will help her to forget Alsace- 
Lorraine." ^ But Bismarck's successor at the Wil- 
helmstrasse had other views. The Kaiser cast cov- 
etous eyes on the French colonial dominions: he 
wanted his share of Morocco; he demanded, and ob- 
tained, a part of the French Congo. Meanwhile, 
by the provocative action of his officials in the lost 
provinces he was bringing back the gaze of French- 
men to that eastern frontier from which Bismarck 
had so shrewdly diverted it. The affairs of Tan- 
gier, 1906, and of Agadir, 1911, inflamed French 
nationalism, and raised amongst certain classes a 
wave of patriotism of the Chauvinist type. 

It was chiefly among the bourgeoisie and the in- 
tellectuals that this nationalist form of patriotism 
gained ground. Those who were possessed by it 
exulted in the death of internationalism, which they 

^ Thus the Duke of Wellington some forty years earlier is 
said to have assured his fellow-countrymen that Europe would 
have nothing to fear from France as long as she was occupied 
with Algeria, 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 29 

condemned as "mere scholastic sentimentality" and 
"hopelessly out of date." Only a few months be- 
fore the War we find the academician, M. Alfred 
Capus, writing in the "Figaro" that "before M. 
d'Estournelles de Constant and his pacifists can 
bring the nations of the world to The Hague tri- 
bunal, many a port — perhaps The Hague itself — 
will have been bombarded." 

But although these words have proved partly 
prophetic, M. Capus and his friends exaggerated. 
Internationalism was not dead. Far from it; on 
the rank and file of the French nation international- 
ist and anti-militarist ideas were taking a stronger 
and stronger hold. This was proved by the anti- 
militarist demonstrations which occurred through- 
out the country on the passing of the three years' 
military service law in 1913. Of this measure Ana- 
tole France wrote: Elle n'a pour elle ni Vunite de 
armee ni meme Vunanimite de la bourgeoisie, elle 
a contre elle le proletariat tout entier et tons les 
paysans.^ 

The socialist party, led in the French Chamber 
by that great orator, Jean Jaures, was pacifist to a 
man. Pacifist also was the spirit of the great syn- 
dicalist movement.^ 

^ Article, Pour la Paix, "English Review," August, IQIS. 
*See post, pp. 122, 128. 



30 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Les classes populaires, again to quote Anatole 
France, sont pacifistes; elles sont en totalite pad- 
fistes, Tous les ouviers de la grande Industrie, tout 
le proletariat . , . est entierement hostile a Videe 
d'agression, de conquete, d'imperialisine, Elle est 
penetree de la maocime socialiste 'Tunion des trav- 
ailleurs sera la paix du mondej" ^ 

Never was anti-militarism stronger in France 
than in the years which immediately preceded the 
War, when syndicalists were protesting against the 
burden of a permanent army ; when Gustav Herve, 
the editor of "la Guerre Sociale," ^ suffered im- 
prisonment for his extreme pacifism ; when the late 
Remy de Gourmont lost his appointment at the 
Bibliotheque Nationale as the result of an article 
in the "Mercure de France," in which he denounced 
patriotism, exclaiming, "To die for la patrie! we 
sing another song, we cultivate a different kind of 
poetry. If we were to be frank, we should say we 
are not patriots." Reactionaries at the same time 
were equally extreme; nationalist republicans were 
loudly clamouring for La Revanche; royalists, led 
by Charles Maurras and the newspaper "1' Action 
fran9aise," were declaring that France would nevei 

^ Article cit. Pour la Paix. 

^ Now "la Victoire." See post, p. 127. 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 31 

be herself again until she had brought back the 
King and the Pope. 

Never at any period of French history had the 
waves of party strife risen higher or beaten more 
furiously. 

Then suddenly one summer day the tocsin rang 
over the fields of France; and instantly at that 
sound, which announced that la patrie was in dan- 
ger, every other voice was still, the noise of discord 
ceased; for in all minds, were they socialist, na- 
tionalist, anarchist, or pacifist, there was but one 
thought, la patrie, the deliverance of la patrie from 
that German peril which for centuries has lowered 
through the gap in the Vosges. 

At the tocsin's first peal there vanished, or rather 
there merged into one, all those various aspects of 
France of which we used to hear so much before 
the War : the New France, the Young France, the 
Real France, the False France, the France of 
Rome, the France of Geneva, the France of the 
Classicists, the France of the Romanticists, the 
France of Combes, the France of Bar res; there re- 
mained only la France. 

All through the centuries, from the days of 
Sparta downwards, never has the world seen a 
more absolute, a more perfect union of hitherto 



32 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

warring factions in the bonds of patriotism. None 
were more amazed by this unanimity than French- 
men themselves. They could hardly believe their 
own ears when they heard socialists responding to 
the mobilisation order with the words, "We'll settle 
accounts among ourselves afterwards, but now we 
must be off." They marvelled to see Catholic priest 
and Jewish rabbi going forth to the trenches arm 
in arm, the socialist Vaillant shaking hands with the 
nationalist deputy, the revanchard Barres ad- 
dressed as mon cher Barres by the arch-pacifist, 
Herve ; Remy de Gourmont, on his death-bed, with- 
drawing his denunciations of patriotism; Joseph 
Reinach, that ardent champion of Dreyfus, joining 
the League of Patriots; the Baron d'Estournelles 
de Constant, most zealous of internationalists, pro- 
claiming that this War must be fought to the fin- 
ish, i, e„ until "Prussian domination" and "Ger- 
man militarism" have been destroyed. No wonder 
that Barres, writing of the historic meeting of the 
French Chamber on August 5, 1914, exclaimed: 
"We knew that there would be no wide divergence 
of opinion among us, but this prodigious union of 
hearts and minds transcends all our hopes." 

That there exist in France many conflicting 
opinions as to the conduct of the War no one can 
deny. But the complete suspension of party dis- 



FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES 33 

cord as to all the main issues was proved by the 
constitution of the Coalition Ministry of 1916. 
There we saw sitting side by side in amicable con- 
ference moderate republicans like M. de Freycinet, 
ardent anti-clericals like M, Emile Combes, social- 
ists like M. Albert Thomas and M. Marcel Sem- 
bat, who did not refuse to serve in a Cabinet pre- 
sided over by a Prime Minister once regarded by 
them and their comrades as a renegade/ Again, 
in 1918, during the German offensive even socialist 
deputies suspended their opposition to M. Clemen- 
ceau's government. 

This unanimity of the governing classes extends 
throughout the whole French nation — to men, 
women, and children, to aristocracy, bourgeoisie, 
and proletariat. Few of us in England have any 
idea how completely, how intensely, during this 
war-time, the whole mind and heart of France are 
set upon one thing, one thing only : the deliverance 
of la patrie. All barriers of class and creed and 
opinion have been broken down ; and now at length 
the two hitherto divergent nationalist and inter- 
nationalist currents flow in one broad stream of 
patriotism. 

Well may cosmopolitans and nationalists now 
fight side by side, for they see, as we see, that the 

^ See post, p. 128. 



34 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

German peril, which for so long threatened France, 
threatens the whole civilised world; that the cause 
of France is indeed the cause of humanity. They 
and we have proved the truth of Jaures' words: 
Un peu d'internationalisme eloigne de la patrie: 
beaucoup d'internationalisme y ramene. Un peu 
de patriotisme eloigne de V Internationale; beau- 
coup de patriotisme y ramene. Said a French 
soldier, writing to me from the trenches: "We shall 
never give in, because our defeat would be the de- 
feat of humanity." 



CHAPTER III 

WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 

To many famous French writers the War has 
proved an abundant inspiration. Their names — 
Bourget, Bordeaux, Bazin, Prevost, Barres — on 
yellow volumes encircled with the pink label, '"vient 
de paraitre'* grow more and more familiar to the 
English reader. But Anatole France is not of 
these. 

Son of a member of Charles X's bodyguard, 
himself at twenty-six a soldier of 1870, at the be- 
ginning of this War he announced his intention of 
exchanging his pen for the sword. When the 
French Government refused him permission to 
wear the soldier's uniform, M. France retired into 
the provinces. There he observes keenly, talks bril- 
liantly, but writes little. Now and again he pays 
Paris a brief visit. After an absence of many 
years, he attended a meeting of the French Acade- 
my, and he laughed to see the world Press attaching 
high significance to what he himself regarded as an 
unimportant and accidental occurrence. The other 

35 



36 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

day he quitted his rural retreat to witness the re- 
production at a Parisian theatre of his Noces 
CorinthienneSj only to find it interrupted by the 
firing of the long-range gun. 

Since August, 1914, he has signed his name to 
two volumes only. In 1915 appeared Sur la Voie 
Glorieuse, a collection of articles and letters to 
poiluSj published (by Edouard Champion) for the 
benefit of wounded soldiers; and in 1917 le Genie 
Latin, a series of prefaces, utterly remote from the 
War, having been written long ago and collected 
and published by Lemerre in 1913, but now reissued 
by Calmann Levy, with a few alterations, chiefly 
suppressions. 

How can one account, in the face of the greatest 
conflict humanity has ever witnessed, for the com- 
parative silence of so shrewd and philosophic a 
writer, who is more famous, perhaps, than any other 
Uving European author? With the delicate taste 
that has always distinguished him M. France may 
regard the present as not a time for that satire 
and irony which are his greatest gifts. For many 
years before 1914, obsessed by a sense of the im- 
pending calamity, he had discussed it; and I heard 
him foretell it as far back as 1908. Speaking of the 
Franco-British Entente, he then said to me: "In 
the great European conflagration now approach- 




M. Paul Bourget 



WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 37 

ing, England and France will fight side by side 
against Germany. You will do all the work on 
sea, we on land." Not an unnatural prognostica- 
tion, considering the size of our army and the 
French idea of their military strength ! Then, with 
a n ischievous smile, he added: "And by way of 
reward you will send us some of your excellent 
Chester cheese." 

The Maitre had then just completed his Vie de 
Jeanne d'Arc, in the introduction to which are some 
of the finest pages he has ever written. 

In the year of Austria's annexation of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, two years after Algeciras, three 
before Agadir, we find him, in common with other 
leading European statesmen of that day, gazing 
on the war cloud which was even then lowering 
over Europe.^ After enumerating the forces which 
might conduce to the maintenance of peace, M. 
France writes: 3Iais que nous soyons assures des 
a present d'une paix que rien ne troublera, il faudra 

^ See What is Austria? By Henry Wickham Steed, "Edin- 
burgh Review," October, 1917, p. 367- "I was in Vienna 
throughout the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908. ... I re- 
peatedly discussed with prominent Austrians and with mem- 
bers of the Austro-Hungarian Staff the likelihood of a gen- 
eral European War. From them I gained the impression 
that war was probable, if not certain, in a comparatively 
near future, that the pretext chosen would be some Austro- 
Serbian dispute, and that while the Austro-Hungarian forces 
engaged Serbia and withstood or invaded Russia, the German 



88 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

etre insense pour le pretendre. Les terribles ri- 
valites industrielles et commerciales qui grandissent 
autour de nous font pressentir au contraire, de 
futurs conflits et rien ne nous assure que la France 
ne se verra pas un jour enveloppee dans um^e con- 
flagration europeenne ou mondiale, Et V obligation 
ou elle se trouve de pourvoir a sa defense naccroit 
pas peu les difficultes que lui cause un ordre social 
profondement trouble par la concurrence de la 
production et Vantagonisme des classes. 

From almost every possible angle M. France 
had regarded this stupendous modern problem of 
war. He had dealt with it in much the same way 
as for many years he had been accustomed to deal 
with his own house in the little cul-de-sac, known 
as the Villa Said, which turns out of the Bois de 
Boulogne. 

That house was always in the hands of work- 
men, forever undergoing reconstruction, passing 
from one style to another as the interests of its 
master shifted. When he had finished his Jeanne 

army would attack France swiftly through Belgium. This 
plan of compaign was by no means new. M. Clemenceau had 
discussed it with Sir Edward Grey in London after the 
funeral of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in April, 1908, 
and, as I have reason to know, it was again mentioned by M. 
Clemenceau during his interview with King Edward at Marlen- 
bad in the August of the same year/' 

^ La Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, p. Ixxiv. 



WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 39 

dfArc, for instance, and was turning from the 
Italian art of the fifteenth century to the French 
and Enghsh painters of the eighteenth, beginning 
a work on Proud'hon, which, if completed, has as 
far as I know never been published, he exchanged 
the massive chests and cabinets of the Renaissance 
period for the lighter and more graceful furniture 
of Louis XV. 

Shortly before the war, having bought a house 
at Versailles, he was about to leave the Villa Said. 
On a Sunday in May, 1914, we were gathered, sev- 
eral of us, in his library. Everything spoke of de- 
parture. The shelves had been stripped of their 
books, which had been packed into huge cases, 
ranged all round the room. There reigned an 
atmosphere of crisis and upheaval, like that of M. 
Bergeret's removal. Though M. France explained 
that he was not abandoning the house, only leaving 
it temporarily for the purpose of certain recon- 
structions, we could not help feeling oppressed by 
a sense of finality, which imparted significance to 
the most trivial remark. Thus, when the lady who 
directs his household, making a step towards the 
door, being asked, "Where are you going?" and 
replying "Merely to close the door," received the 
rejoinder, "Do not close it upon yourself," one 



40 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

felt how more than one door was being closed that 
morning. 

After seven months of war, in February, 1915, 
I saw the house again. Passing down the Villa 
Said, instinctively, though I knew le maitre was 
not in Paris, I looked for his house. I looked in 
vain. In vain I sought the well-known door with 
its bronze knocker, the head of a woman delicately 
carved, and the peep-hole, that "Judas" through 
which used to peer suspiciously the eye of his old 
servant, a member of the Reformed Church of 
Geneva. "Madame is seeking the house of M. 
Anatole France?" said a butler, coming out on to 
a neighbour's doorstep. "There it is." 

I looked and saw nothing but a blank wall. 
Knocker, door, windows even, all had disappeared. 
Blind and dumb remained the master's house. 
More struck by this sight than by anything I had 
seen or heard in Paris since the War, I lingered 
in front of this transmogrified facade. Gradually 
it grew expressive. Was not the house, which had 
once spoken so eloquently of its owner's varying 
moods, now even more silent than the master him- 
self? 

If we would discover, therefore, the master's 
views on that difficult problem of peace and war 
we must turn not so much to the rare letters and 



WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 41 

articles he has pubhshed since 1914 — interesting 
and significant as these may be, and from some of 
them we shall quote later — but rather n:ust we 
consult that goodly array of his some forty pre- 
War volumes. And here we shall find him, with his 
well-nigh unique capacity for considering things 
from varying points of view, turning the question 
about and about, foreseeing a future from which a 
League of Nations would banish war; also fore- 
seeing one in which strife, if not between nations 
between classes, might kill civilisation. Wars he 
condemns as execrable, and with his Abbe, Jerome 
Coignard, he jeers at man as un animal a mosquet. 
But those are wars of conquest. Xow, on rare 
occasions when he takes up his pen, he glorifies as 
une guerre de defense, de liberation, this War, 
which "the Germans have made the most hideous 
the world has ever seen." 

Readers of Sur la Pierre Blanche will remember 
that in one of those conversations, which by the 
way actually took place in the little wooden house 
of the archaeologist, M. Boni, dominating the Pala- 
tine, Xicole Langelier expresses his belief in the 
establishment of universal peace. It will come, 
he says, not because men will grow better (that 
one may not venture to hope), but because a new 
order, a new science, new economic necessities will 



42 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

impose a state of peace, as formerly other conditions 
imposed a state of belligerence. Among these new 
necessities Langelier mentions: increased and per- 
fected means of communication between all races 
and all peoples, a stronger and more general senti- 
ment of human solidarity, the methodical organi- 
sation of labour and the establishment of the 
United States of the World. 

But Langelier is not enough of an optimist to 
believe that any one there present would live to 
see the dawn of that pacific era in the world's 
history. Nevertheless, may we not surmise that 
this War has begun to inspire the author of Sur la 
Pierre Blanche with the hope of witnessing that 
glorious day, for do we not find him entitling one 
of his articles Dehout pour la derniere guerre! ^ 

Of soldiers and sailors, M. France before the 
war expressed varying opinions. Once he won- 
dered whether the dangers to which they were ex- 
posed were really greater than those run by civil- 
ian workers, constantly threatened, through our 
wretched industrial conditions, with death from 
disease and poverty. Elsewhere he had pronounced 
confidently that cest auoc soldats que revient Vhon- 
neur des plus heaux et des plus penibles sacrifices. 
Now he writes : "We bear them all upon our hearts 

^ Contributed to the Booh of France. Macmillan, 1915. 



WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 43 

from the commander-in-chief ... to the humblest 
soldier of the second class, who freely offers his 
life to that patrie of which he knew but a single 
village, and in which his sole possession was a 
shake-down in a stable." ^ 

There is only one class of soldiers with whom 
to-day M. France does not sympathise: that is the 
military caste, the Junkers, who are so largely re- 
sponsible for this War. Long ago they had suf- 
fered from the trenchant irony of the Abbe Jerome 
Coignard. He inquires^ whether en realite cette 
gentilhommerie militaire roidie avec tant d'orgueil 
au dessus de nous is anything but les restes de- 
generes de ces malheureux chasseurs des hois que 
le poete Lucrece a peints de telle maniere quon 
doute si ce sont des hommes on des hetes. 

Writing in "le Petit Parisien" ^ on le Quatorze 
Juillet, 1915, M. France thus addresses the brave 
defenders of la patrie — 

"Dear soldiers, heroic children of the Father- 
land, to-day is your festival, for it is the festival of 
France. The 14th of July breaks in a dawn of 
blood and glory. We celebrate and we honour 
your brethren fallen in immortal battles, and you, 

^ Sur la Voie Glorieuse, p. 22. 
^ Les opinions de VAhhe Jerome Coignard, p. l65. 
^ The following translation by the present writer appeared 
in The Daily Chronicle. 



44 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

to whom we send our good wishes, with this heart- 
felt cry: Live! Triumph! 

"One hundred and twenty-six years ago to-day 
the people of Paris, armed with pikes and guns, 
to the beating of drums and the ringing of the tocsin 
pressed in a long line down the Faubourg Saint- 
Antoine, attacked the Bastille, and, after five hours' 
conflict beneath deadly fire, took possession of the 
hated fortress. A symbolical victory won over 
tyranny and despotism, a victory by which the 
French people inaugurated a new regime. Dear 
soldiers, dear fellow-citizens, I address you on this 
solemn festival because I love you and honour you 
and think of you unceasingly. 

"I am entitled to speak to you heart to heart 
because I have a right to speak for France, being 
one of those who have ever sought, in freedom of 
judgment and uprightness of conscience, the best 
means of making their country strong. I am en- 
titled to speak to you because, not having desired 
war, but being compelled to suffer it, I, like you, 
like all Frenchmen, am resolved to wage it till the 
end, until justice shall have conquered iniquity, 
civilisation barbarism, and the nations are delivered 
from the monstrous menace of an oppressive mili- 
tarism. I have a right to speak to you because I 
am one of the few who have never deceived you, 



WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 45 

and who have never believed that you needed lies 
for the maintenance of your courage; one of the 
few who, rejecting as unworthy of you deceptive 
fictions and misleading silence, have told you the 
truth. 

"I told you in December last year: 'This War 
will be cruel and long.' I tell you now: 'You have 
done much, but all is not over. The end of your 
labours approaches, but is not yet.' You are fight- 
ing against an enemy fortified by long preparation 
and immense material. Your foe is unscrupulous. 
He has learned from his leaders that inhumanity is 
the soldier's first virtue. Arming himself in a 
manner undreamed of hitherto by the most for- 
midable of conquerors, he causes rivers of blood to 
flow and breathes forth vapours charged with 
torpor and with death. Endure, persevere, dare. 
Remain what you are and none shall prevail against 
you. You are fighting for your native land, that 
laughing, fertile land, the most beautiful in the 
world: for your fields and your meadows. For the 
august mother, who, crowned with vine-leaves and 
with ears of corn, waits to welcome you and to feed 
you with all the inexhaustible treasures of her 
breast. You are fighting for your village belfry, 
your roofs of slate or tile, with wreaths of smoke 



46 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

curling up into the serene sky, for your fathers' 
graves, your children's cradles. 

"You are fighting for our august cities, on the 
banks of whose rivers rise the monuments of gen- 
erations — romanesque churches, cathedrals, min- 
sters, abbeys, palaces, triumphal arches, columns 
of bronze, theatres, museums, town halls, hospitals, 
statues of sages and of heroes — whose walls whether 
modest or magnificent, shelter alike commerce, in- 
dustry, science and the arts, all that constitutes the 
beauty of life. 

"You are fighting for our moral heritage, our 
manners, our uses, our laws, our customs, our be- 
liefs, our traditions. For the works of our sculp- 
tors, our architects, our painters, our engravers, 
our goldsmiths, our enamellers, our glass-cutters, 
our weavers. For the songs of our musicians. For 
our mother tongue which, with ineffable sweetness, 
for eight centuries has flowed from the lips of our 
poets, our orators, our historians, our philosophers. 
For the knowledge of man and of nature. For that 
encyclopsedic learning which attained among us 
the high-water mark of precision and lucidity. You 
are fighting for the genius of France, which enlight- 
ened the world and gave freedom to the nations. 
By this noble spirit bastilles are overthrown. And 
lastly, you are fighting for the homes of Belgians. 



WAR IN THE ATEITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 47 

English, Russians, Italians, Serbians, not for 
France merely, but for Europe, ceaselessly dis- 
turbed, and furiously threatened, by Germany's 
devouring ambition. 

• ••••« 

"The Fatherland! Liberty! Beloved children 
of France, these are the sacred treasures com- 
mitted to your keeping; for their sakes you endure 
without complaint prolonged fatigue and constant 
danger; for their sakes you will conquer. 

"And you, women, children, old men, strew with 
flowers and foliage all the roads of France: our 
soldiers will return triumphant." 

Since July, 1915, when Anatole France wrote 
these stirring lines, dark and sometimes desperate 
has often appeared the cause of the Allies. To so 
voluptuous, sensitive and pitiful a soul the horrors 
of this war have brought an agony of suffering. 
Nevertheless, when the master has taken up his 
pen, it has always been in a spirit of courage and 
of hope. For never would he allow to escape from 
him a gesture of discouragement. And now in the 
fullness of his years he is permitted to witness 
the victory his stout-heartedness has helped to win. 



CHAPTER IV 

AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARNE 

In peace-time, those who were in the habit of 
constantly crossing the Channel found little to 
distinguish one journey from another. Now 
monotony has vanished: every crossing brings a 
new set of experiences. To begin with, as the War 
advances the route changes. At first civilians were 
permitted to cross by the short passage, military 
and non-military in the same trains and steamers. 
On my first War departure, in January, 1915, I 
set out from Victoria in a carriage full of officers 
bound for the front. And one seemed to be quite 
near "the real thing" when, on entering the Paris 
train at Boulogne, one saw standing parallel with 
it another, the destination of which was the firing 
line. In those days the eight-hour railway journey 
to Paris took one round by Beauvais. The old four 
hour route by Amiens was impracticable on 
account of the destruction of bridges during the 
battle of the Marne. 

Once arrived in Paris, the scene was altogether 
unusual. 

48 



AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARNE 49 

Londoners had been saying that since its removal 
from the War-zone the French capital had become 
normal. And thus it seemed at &st as in the rare 
smishine of dull January one sauntered through 
the Palais Royal. But out in the broad thorough- 
fares this impression of normality vanished. In- 
deed, everything was so changed, the comparatively 
empty streets presented such an unfamiliar aspect, 
that it was almost difficult to find one's way about. 
In the Avenue de I'Opera it was obvious that a 
large part of the populace had not yet returned 
from its exodus during the previous autumn. There 
were few pedestrians on the pavements, fewer 
vehicles in the roadway. On the Boulevard des 
Capucines, not a single motor-bus — they had all 
been requisitioned for the front. In commercial 
quarters, round the General Post Office, for ex- 
ample, at eleven o'clock on a working-day morning 
it was like the City of London on Sunday or a 
bank holiday. The narrow thoroughfares con- 
necting the Grands Boulevards might have been 
streets in some quiet country town. Standing near 
the Pantheon — looking Seine- wards down the long 
incline of the Rue St. Jacques, usually thronged 
with traffic, nothing was visible along the whole 
extent of the roadway but three drays and one 
cart. 



50 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

When the clock struck noon, one missed the 
joyful rush of clerks and artisans, of trim midi- 
nettes and shop-girls, all pressing along the narrow 
streets hastening to the first meal of the day, as 
gaily and loquaciously as children let out of school 
— all that merry jostling and bustling, which in 
peace-time was one of the pleasantest of Paris 
sights, had disappeared. A stream of quiet serious 
folk, mostly women, poured into the restaurants, 
once overcrowded, now comfortably filled or half 
empty. 

In the afternoon, especially in shopping quarters, 
there were a few more people in the streets. Some- 
times the Printemps, the Louvre, and the Bon 
Marche would seem almost as thronged as in peace- 
time — "not with purchasers though," I was told by 
my Parisian companion; "most of these people 
i: erely come to look at things." Parisian women, 
neat as ever, were dressing plainly, and affecting 
"le Sportif." Feminine head-gear throughout the 
War has always been that of the soldier of the 
nation most popular for the hour. In January, 
1915, it was a tasselled cap modelled on the Belgian 
soldier's, later it was to be the Russian kepi, later 
still the American sailor's quaint little hat with the 
button in the middle. The shop windows displayed 
wares suggestive of the War — Red Cross nurses' 



AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARNE 51 

uniforms, huge stacks of wool, all kinds of woollen 
comforts for men in the trenches, tins of sweets 
and preserves labelled for "our soldiers." 

The book-shops in those early War days showed 
few new books.^ But there were rows of pre-War 
Alsatian stories, such as Barres' Colette Baudoche, 
Lichtenbergres' Juste Lobel, Acker's Exiles. 

On the Left Bank many shops, as the notice 
on the shutters indicated, were "closed on account 
of mobilisation." Before one of these, the office of 
the famous Cahiers de la Quinzaine in the Rue 
de la Sorbonne, I stood and thought how those 
closed shutters signified the closing not of one house 
only, not merely the end of a literary periodical, but 
the passing of a whole literary epoch. 

For in the pages of les Cahiers, founded by 
Charles Peguy in 1900, blossomed the finest flower 
of twentieth-century French literature. There 
Crainquebille and Jean Christophe both made their 
first appearance. The Cahiers might have 
rested their reputation on that. But as time went 
on the poet founder and editor came to preside over 
a literary circle, including besides Anatole France 
and Romain Rolland, many minor brilliant lights: 
the brothers Tharaud, for example, the Halevys 
and Julien Benda. It was, as Barres has called it, 

^ For how different it became later, see post, pp. 96, 97. 



52 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

la chapelle oil il [Peguy] etait aime jusqua 
Vidolatrie. 

It was round one of the most humble-minded of 
men that the worshippers in that chapel used to 
gather every Thursday afternoon in the little back 
parlour of the Rue de la Sorbonne office. There, 
desiring to subscribe to les Cahiers, I had the 
honour of a few minutes' talk with Peguy shortly 
before the outbreak of the War. Little did I then 
dream that in a few months this shy, insignificant- 
looking little man would be glorified by a hero's 
death. For he fell during the first battle of the 
Marne, in September, 1914, commanding as lieu- 
tenant, leading his men to attack ; and one hundred 
of his little company of 250 perished with him. 
Already a year ago rain and wind beating upon 
the tricolour which waves over his grave at Villeroy 
had washed it almost white, and the little heap of 
earth marking the place of his burial had been worn 
almost level with the surrounding soil. But 
Peguy' s memory has not faded, neither has his 
monument perished. They live in the memorials 
of a humble life passionately devoted to all that 
is good and noble and in the poetic dignity and 
charm of his literary work.^ 

^ For his biography, see Charles Peguy CEuvres Choisics 
(Bernard Grasset). For his life and letters during the War, 



AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARXB 53 

In France no profession has suffered more from 
the War than that of literature. The Bulletin da 
EcrivainSy a pubhcation destined for free circula- 
tion among writers at the front, in November, 1914, 
recorded the names of seventeen French authors 
who had fallen on the field of honour. By the fol- 
lowing February there were fifty, and towards the 
end of the year the number was creeping up to 
two hundred. 

How many a familiar figure has vanished from 
the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, from the 
book-stall galleries beneath the Odeon, from the 
book-boxes on those quays which now gleam so 
picturesquely in the moonlight with a beauty un- 
suspected in the glaring nights of peace. By nine 
o'clock Paris streets and even the boulevards were 
almost deserted. But one might wander along 
them without fear of apaches, for they were all at 
the front. 

"Have you ever commanded apaches?" I in- 
quired of a French officer, 

''Madame," he repHed, "I have never command- 
ed anything else." 

"And how do you find them?" 

"In the attack they are magnificent, but when 
they are resting they turn your hair grey." 

Avec Charles Peguy. De la Lorraine a la Marne, A6ut — 
Septembre, 1914 (Hachette). 



CHAPTER V 

WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 

Nowhere was the once familiar scene more 
changed than in a suburban house, where, before the 
War, I had spent many a delightful holiday. 

The house stands on the banks of the Marne a 
few miles out of Paris. The Metro takes you to 
a yellow tram-car, which, after carrying you along 
the narrow, winding streets of the banlieue, sets 
you down at the top of a steep, ill-paved incline. A 
little way down you come on a high stone wall 
broken by a massive gate, inscribed with the words 
Maison de Watteau, Here, in a typically French 
seventeenth-century house, died that typical French 
eighteenth-century painter. As the concierge 
opens the gate, Watteau's house appears in the 
harmony of its classic proportions, in the dignity 
of its austere lines. Que c'est beau, que c'est fran- 
fais, exclaimed in my hearing, as he crossed its 
threshold, a famous French artist of to-day. 
Traversing a noble courtyard, you enter beneath a 
tympanum of sculptured angels, blowing trumpet 

54 



WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 55 

blasts, and heralding, as we liked to think, the 
approaching victory. In the hall is a beautiful 
low relief representing the Passage of the Rhine. 
Through the glass of the opposite door you perceive 
the terrace overlooking a vast expanse of undulat- 
ing lawns and woods leading down to the Marne 
and away beyond the river to the battlefield of 
Champigny, where the old trenches speak of the 
inrush of an earlier German peril. 

Here, barely an hour's journey from the turmoil 
of Paris, yet in the perfect calm of a sequestered 
existence, surrounded by memorials eloquent of the 
past history of their race, Monsieur and Madame — 
he one of the most eminent among the younger 
French historians, she a well-known Salon artist — 
used to spend the summer in rural pursuits and 
rustic solitude. 

Now what a transformation I 

"How different from the quiet lives of Mon- 
sieur, Madame, and me!" plaintively sighed the 
maitre d'hotel, as he laid the table for forty. 

For in that once reposeful house is to-day the 
ceaseless bustle of a military hospital. Monsieur 
is with the colours, Madame has laid aside her 
brush and pallette : she has exchanged the painter's 
blouse for a Red Cross nurse's uniform. In almost 
every room, in Monsieur's study, in Madame's 



56 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

studio, are hospital beds — fifty in those early days, 
but gradually increasing ds the need grew until 
now, in 1918, they number seventy. Monsieur's 
dressing-room is a dispensary, one of the bath- 
rooms an operating theatre. In the park, which 
one used to people with Watteau's airy nymphs 
and gallants, there now lounge or hobble the sub- 
stantial figures of convalescent soldiers. They are 
wearing any nondescript garments obtainable, 
while busy fingers cleanse and repair their own 
poor tattered, blood-stained, and mud-bespattered 
uniforms. 

Already, in those early weeks, Madame had re- 
ceived 113 patients, including a few grands blesses, 
some dozen typhoid cases, isolated in one of her 
houses on the other side of the park, and four of 
tetanus. All, save two, had recovered. Such a 
fact in itself is enough to prove the Frenchwoman's 
capacity and adaptability. For, with the exception 
of a nun, there was no member of the staff whom 
we in England should regard as a "trained nurse." 
Madame and her sister hold their French Red 
Cross diploma, which is roughly equivalent to the 
certificate granted by our St. John Ambulance 
Society ; and no further qualifications are possessed 
by the ladies of the neighbourhood, who, with ad- 
mirable devotion, labour day and night to tend the 



WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 6T 

wounded. All through these long years they have 
remained at their posts. The same bright familiar 
faces greet me whenever I return to the hospital. 

The equipment, organisation, and direction, in 
these difficult War days, of such an institution, by 
two ladies, hitherto totally inexperienced in the 
matter, has been a veritable tour de force, I have 
often heard them say that without the help of the 
local doctor, one of the finest types of Frenchmen, 
they could not have accomplished it. He, alas! 
was called to the firing line soon after the battle 
of the Marne. His friends at the hospital treasure 
a letter written at the close of the battle of Soissons. 

"We have come out of the furnace," he wrote, 
*'to re-form our division. Oh, the mar mites" 
(literally "saucepans," but equivalent to what our 
boys call "Jack Johnsons"), "and yet the soup was 
cold when we got time to eat it. Our bed is the 
earth, or a rock, or a cave floor. But with it all we 
are thoroughly up to our work, and our morale is 
good. The regiment has not suffered so much. 
We have not lost any guns, and not even our am- 
bulance. As soon as we have re-formed, we return. 
Vive la France! Three doctors killed in the infan- 
try! I shall never have that luck!" Only a few 
weeks later that "luck," as he patriotically calls it, 
did fall to his lot. 



W THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Every detail of hospital management, in those 
days of complete mobilisation, was supremely diffi- 
cult. Not only doctors were wanting, but helpers 
of every kind. The maitre dfhotel, after having 
been overlooked for the first few months, was 
eventually called up. Then his wife, the cook, as- 
sumed her husband's duties as well as her own, and 
she has performed them extremely well. 

At first it seemed almost impossible to find a com- 
petent driver for the ambulance. "It's aeroplanes 
he understands !" the cook would say apologetically, 
when the chauffeur returned by tram, announcing 
that he had abandoned la voiture somewhere on 
the road to Paris. 

It was in the ambulance that we went to market. 
And seldom did we accomplish the journey to town 
without some mishap. We used to start for Paris 
at seven, reckoning to be back by ten, in time for 
cook to prepare the patients' eleven o'clock de- 
jeuner. 

Never shall I forget one glorious winter morn- 
ing, when the hoar frost clothed the park in crystal- 
line beauty and the rosy dawn was creeping up 
from the mists of the valley. Everything seemed 
perfectly peaceful as we sped through the invigor- 
ating morning air, down through the village into 
the glades of the great wood. Here, however, there 



WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 59 

were signs of war, for the sheep and cows, which 
had been brought to the outskirts of the city to pro- 
vide food in case of siege, were still in their pens 
near the road- side, and the bright uniforms of sol- 
diers exercising or on the march glimmered through 
the yellow green of mossy tree-trunks. At the 
Paris Gate things were as usual. For the defences 
hastily constructed when the Germans were march- 
ing towards the city had recently been removed. 
In the outer boulevards the day's business had 
already begun, and long before we actually reached 
the market-place we were in the thick of the market 
melee. 

Leaving our car at a street corner, the proces- 
sion of us — f. e,y Madame, the cook, the lodge- 
keeper, the chauffeur, a gardener, and myself — 
all bearing baskets, started to wend our way 
through the bargaining throng. 

Most pleasing was the colour scheme which here 
enlivened the grey of midwinter. No one who 
enters a market or a greengrocer's shop in France 
can fail to be struck by the artistic taste possessed 
by every class of the French nation. 

Here in les halles with orange pumpkins had 
their hollows filled with parsley. Pink carrots 
scraped to spotless perfection, creamy turnips of 
every size and shape, white and green leeks, rosy 



CO THE FRANCE I KNOW 

red apples, were picturesquely arranged and con- 
trasted in groups of mathematical precision. 

Past these luscious things we followed the cook 
in a preliminary tour of inspection and inquiry. 
For we had over fifty mouths to fill and it was 
necessary to buy to the best advantage. Having 
completed her first round, and ascertained with 
many a head-shake and shoulder-shrug the pre- 
vailing prices, our pilot began her purchases and 
our baskets filled rapidly. It was the price of 
cheese and of salad ingredients that seemed to fill 
this shrewd buyer with most dismay. But she 
admitted to me afterwards that, although prices 
have risen, it may not be due entirely to the War, 
for they always do rise at this time of year. 

Indeed, in those early war-days one heard few 
complaints of the increased cost of living. Pari- 
sians cheerfully adapted their requirements to war- 
time conditions. Their excellent and economical 
cooking made the very best of everything at their 
disposal. Only the most nourishing food was 
served, and the dishes absent from the Parisian 
menu were generally those elaborate sweets and 
savouries which doctors would say one was better 
without. 

Of course on the return journey our "aero- 
planist" did not fail to provide us with the inevita- 



WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 61 

ble accident. And he chose for its occurrence the 
most crowded thoroughfare and one in which no 
taxi was visible. Eventually, however, one was 
discovered; we hastily filled it with the cook and 
the most immediately necessary of our purchases, 
ourselves returning by tram. 



CHAPTER VI 

TALKS BY THE WAY 

Does any reader object that parts of this chapter 
are too trivial, let him pause and recall his Mon- 
taigne, who tells the historian to register every- 
thing, sans cJiois [sic] et sans triage. Let him 
reflect whether anything can be too slight to form 
"a living link in that Tissue of History, which 
inweaves all Being." 

"The English are so noisy!" (lb son si bruyants, 
les Anglais!) Startling was such a complaint on 
the lips of those belonging to a race which we in 
this country have been accustomed to regard as 
nothing if not lively. Yet such was the charge the 
French brought against us in the early months of 
the War. For then there brooded over France a 
silence, like the hush of some great cathedral. Paris 
was marvellously still. Stifled by a police regula- 
tion forbidding the crying of newspapers, dumb 
even were those strident pre- War voices shrieking 
along boulevard curb-stones "la Patrie," "la 
Presse," "I'lntransigeant." 

02 



TALKS BY THE WAY 63 

So complete was the silence that it was almost 
a shock one winter day to hear it broken by loud 
laughter echoing down the boulevard Malesherbes. 
The guffaws were not French, however. They pro- 
ceeded from a lorry rattling along the boulevard 
and packed full to overflowing with British soldiers. 

Nevertheless, in shops, trams, trains, and salons, 
there was some talk of a quiet kind. At the Prin- 
temps, or Bon Marche, no sooner were you under- 
stood to be English than you were asked: *'What 
are they saying over there? How long do they 
think it will last?" If the questions were put at 
the shop counter, other assistants quickly gathered 
round, eager to catch the answer. When, from 
some little fitting cubicle the news of an English- 
woman's presence spread through the department, 
attendants made various excuses for looking in, 
holding pins, or taking down an address, hoping 
meanwhile to learn how the War was affecting 
their chers allies on the other side of the Channel. 

In the hospital there was not much conversation. 
Most of the patients who were well enough to play 
were absorbed in the unfailing recreation of domi- 
noes. The poilu, in those literary and pictorial 
presentations of him which flooded French book- 
shops in the early years of the War, was repre- 
sented as gay and talkative. I have not found him 



64 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

to be SO. With his country invaded, his family in 
the occupied regions, his cottage destroyed, or his 
business ruined, how could he be either mirthful 
or loquacious? Rather was he reserved, silent, 
serious. And he shared these qualities with his 
leaders, with the taciturn JofFre and the Puritan 
Petain. 

All the world over the peasant is reserved, 
especially with foreigners. And seventy-five per 
cent, of the wounded in French hospitals are 
peasants.^ Townsmen have a little more to say. 
Some Parisian artillerymen had come from Ar- 
ras to have their guns repaired in a neighbouring 
munition factory. Their gun-carriages were down 
in a meadow by the Marne; and these men, for- 
bidden by military regulations to join their families 
in Paris, were glad to pass the time in conversation. 
Their regiment, after its formation in an adjoining 
suburb, had been on the Aisne and at Ypres as well 
as at Arras. The gunners told me they had seen 
many of my countrymen. Apparently they had 
formed a high opinion of them in one respect at 
least — 

Us sont tres donnants les Anglais ("They are 
very generous, the English'*). 

^ The last census before the War showed the agricultural 
population of France to be fifty-two per cent, of the whole. 



TALKS BY THE WAY 65 

"But then, Mademoiselle, they are paid better 
than we, and they are better fed." 

''We are learning to understand one another 
well. The Englishman he learns French more 
quickly then we do English. But I know some 
sentences.'' Then I was given two samples of such 
complete Anglo-French that, alas! the words 
sounded to me mere gibberish. Afterwards a 
French friend, who had been present, interpreted 
them as: "Will you have a brandy-and-soda? I 
have no tobacco." Not for worlds would I have 
had my ally suspect how incomprehensible he had 
rendered my mother tongue. So I tried to look 
intelligent. 

Always in public vehicles, people seemed inclined 
to talk. The novel or the newspaper was instantly 
laid aside whenever an opportunity for conversa- 
tion presented itself. 

I had the good luck on a journey from Paris 
to a cathedral town to find myself in a compart- 
ment with two officers — one French, the other 
Belgian. From them I learned that the route we 
were following was that of the army of taxi-cabs 
which, issuing forth from the capital in the previous 
autumn, had helped to win the battle of the Marne. 
To my otherwise undiscerning civilian glance were 
pointed out objects of interest on the line of ad- 



66 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

vance, the stumps of trees cut down to facilitate 
firing, a bridge blown up by the French and 
trenches flooded by the recent heavy rains. 

The Belgian, a cavalry officer, was returning to 
his command at Pervyse after a week's leave in 
Paris. A fine tall figure of a man, over six feet, 
he seemed to revel in the hardships of war. The 
only thing that troubled him was the separation 
from his family, who were in the invaded part of 
Belgium and from whom he had heard nothing for 
weeks. He had been in the fighting line since the 
beginning of the War. He was in Antwerp be- 
fore and during the siege; and he told of the per- 
sistent Belgian attacks made on the German forces 
as soon as news was received that the enemy had 
sent reinforcements south. It was this continuous 
harrying of the German lines by the troops of Ant- 
werp, he thought, which decided the enemy to take 
the city. 

The officer described those hideous thirteen days 
when the poor little Belgian army, half-clothed and 
half -starved, held out on the Iser, encouraged to 
hope every day that they would be reinforced and 
every day disappointed. At length on the thir- 
teenth day, at nine o'clock on a dark moonless 
night, an army of French arrived. They had never 
been under fire and were absolutely worn out with 



TALKS BY THE WAY 671 

marching. But their arrival in the Belgian lines 
was welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm. At 
that moment the enemy's guns were silent. Belgian 
and French were chatting together, when suddenly 
the Germans, having got wind, doubtless by their 
spies, of the French arrival, opened a terrible bom- 
bardment. It was more terrible than any the Bel- 
gians had hitherto experienced, and to the new 
French arrivals it seemed a veritable inferno. At 
once in the black darkness there was chaos and 
panic. In the jostling and battling some were 
pushed into the Iser, and the Belgian giant heard 
a French soldier exclaiming: "Take care, you 
are treading on the feet of the poor little Belgians." 
It was obviously impossible for the Belgians that 
night to take their well-earned repose; they were 
compelled to remain to encourage their French 
comrades. And it was not until morning dawned 
that they were able to retire. 

Refugees from the invaded departments had 
many a thrilhng tale to tell. Some friends of 
mine were spending the summer in their cottage 
at Coucy when the War broke out. My friend's 
husband is an artist of a type now rare, though 
common in Renaissance days. Like William 
Morris, he practises many crafts. He is sculptor, 
engraver, painter, architect, wood-carver, cabinet- 



68 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

maker, and even stone-mason. An intimate 
friend of VioUet-le-Duc, with that famous archae- 
ologist he had often visited the august mediaeval 
fortress of Coucy, one of the finest specimens of 
mediaeval military architecture in Europe. Fas- 
cinated by that superb keep, two hundred feet 
high and one hundred feet in diameter, sur- 
rounded by four towers each a hundred feet 
high, proudly dominating the Aisne Valley, the 
architect longed to build himself a house under the 
shadow of the ramparts of that castle on whose 
lordly walls one of the sires of Coucy had haugh- 
tily inscribed these words ; Roi ne suy, Ne Prince, 
Ne Due, Ne Comte aussi Je suis le Sire de Coucy, 
But land in that neighbourhood was not easily pro- 
curable. My friend waited twenty-five years be- 
fore he could purchase a site. Then, having pro- 
cured some ground, he designed a perfect little 
Gothic model of a house to harmonize with the 
thirteenth century style of the fortress. Slowly, 
deliberately, he began to build, often with his own 
hands laying lovingly one stone upon another. 
Journeying from Paris from time to time, he 
would carve a capital or fashion a quaint piece of 
Gothic furniture. With its beautiful pillared 
studio like a church, its spacious gallery leading 
to the upper rooms, its artistic furniture, its 



TALKS BY THE WAY 69 

mediseval decorations in the old colours of brown 
and blue, never did dwelling more completely ex- 
press its creator's personality. The man was put- 
ting his whole soul into it. It grew gradually like 
a human being. And when I visited the house 
the year before the War it was still incomplete. 

On the outbreak of War, my friend, who was 
old enough to remember 1870, said to his wife: 
"We will stay here; the Germans, even if they 
penetrate so far, will not molest us." But as re- 
ports came in of German behaviour, he grew un- 
easy. The invader of 1914 was evidently different 
from the invader of forty-four years earlier. There 
seemed, however, no need for immediate alarm. 
News travelled slowly to that remote countryside. 
At Coucy, on the 24th of August the Boche was 
believed to have advanced no further than Mau- 
beuge. But that night my friends were awakened 
by the noise of a loud explosion. They learnt in 
the morning that one of the bridges over the Aisne 
had been blown up. A few hours later my friend's 
wife, who speaks English perfectly, saw, coming 
through her garden gate, figures in khaki. "We 
are British troops," they said to her, "and we are in 
full retreat from JNIons; the Germans are behind 
us." The artist and his wife conferred together 
and decided to flee. But when they went down 



70 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

to the little railway station of Coucy-le-Chateau> 
at the foot of the castle hill, they found that trains 
had ceased to run. It was necessary to drive fif- 
teen miles to Soissons. There the railway plat- 
form was packed with fugitives. The last train 
to Paris, when it came in, was packed too. Hap- 
pily it carried a superintendent of the line, whom 
my friends knew. He found them a corner in the 
luggage van. From another Coucy refugee, they 
heard a few days later that the British had only 
occupied the place for a few hours, having con- 
tinued their retreat before the advancing Germans. 
Some months afterwards a Coucy man whom the 
Germans had taken prisoner, having corresponded 
from his German prison with relatives in the 
village, wrote from Germany to my friends that 
their house was occupied by the invaders. Then 
all was silence until the French advance in the 
spring of 1917. What happened at that time has 
been graphically related by the "Morning Post" 
correspondent, Mr. Warner Allen, writing from 
Coucy-le-Chateau on March 28, 1917— 

"About ten days ago a French infantry captain, 
pressing forward with his men over the crest of 
the hills that rise above the valley of the Ailette, 
looked out over the new stretch of country that 



TALKS BY THE WAY 71 

opened to his view a further vision of the promised 
land that was to be won back to France from the 
pollution of the invader. In front of him he saw 
rising nearly two hundred feet from the valley 
on its steep acropolis the castle of Coucy, with its 
great keep and the towers that crowned the angles 
of its walls. The captain had for the moment but 
scant time to waste on the contemplation of the 
wonderful view that opened to his gaze. He was 
pursuing the Germans and his first thought had 
to be for his men. A few minutes after reaching 
the crest, however, the essential orders had been 
given, and he turned again to admire the castle. 
He was the last Frenchman to see Coucy in its 
perfection. As he looked, there came from the 
midst of the castle a blinding blaze of flame. 
The keep and the towers and battlements flew 
asunder, and everything vanished under an 
impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke. When 
after long minutes the cloud cleared away, keep 
and towers and battlements had disappeared as 
utterly as *many-towered Camelot.' All that 
remained of that fairy dream was a ragged piece 
of wall pierced by a window or two, and piles of 
white, fresh broken stone that poured down the 
steep hill-side like a landslip." ^ 

^"The Morning Post/' April S, 1917. 



72 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Not content with so colossal a work of destruc- 
tion as tlie anniliilation of this grand fortress, the 
barbarians, who seemed to possess an unlimited 
supply of explosives, proceeded to blow up every 
house in the village. Marvellously the artist's house 
escaped complete annihilation. A photograph, 
taken by a French officer in 1917, shows part of the 
fa9ade still standing. The remainder of the build- 
ing has perished. And behind it, where that im- 
mense mass of masonry had once stood, there is 
nothing. 

I am told that during the German occupation 
an article on Coucy appeared in a German 
magazine. It ended with these words: "We 
regret to state that the charming little artist's 
house, situated close to the chateau, has been 
terribly pillaged by the English"! To us who 
know that all the English when in full retreat 
halted there but a few hours, while the Germans 
remained in possession for two years, such a 
statement seems slightly lacking in verisimilitude. 

The winning of the War has from the beginning 
been the all-absorbing concern of the French; 
those words la defense nationale have never failed 
to thrill every heart. Yet other minor matters, 
not unconnected with it, have from time to time 



TALKS BY THE WAY 78 

been discussed in all circles : the prevalence of spies, 
the question of the shirkers (embusques) , Boloism, 
Defaitism, the re-education of the wounded, some 
ministerial crisis, or the activities of "Big Bertha." 
It was edifying to follow the various spy stories 
across the Channel: in a Montparnasse studio to 
be told the not unfamiliar tale of the horrible 
treachery of a German governess employed — ac- 
cording to one in Mr. Asquith's household, to an- 
other in ]Mr. Lloyd George's, to yet another in that 
of a famous St. John's Wood artist. The officer 
disguised in British uniform, whose foot was 
trodden on by some ardent patriot, and who swore 
in German, seemed strangely ubiquitous; for ap- 
parently he indulged in this incriminating language 
in the Paris Metro, a Leamington tram-car, and an 
Oxford Street 'bus! 

At a luncheon party given by a well-known 
Parisian hostess the talk was all of the re-education 
of the wounded. Lying on the drawing-room 
table was a curious object, a false leg in basket- 
work. "They used to bring her bouquets, now 
they bring her legs," pathetically murmured in my 
ear a fellow-guest. But it was not without a pur- 
pose that the wicker-work leg lay there on the 
table. It was no mere casual litter, like the wicker- 
work dressmaker's model of Anatole France, le 



74 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Mannequin df Osier, the presence of which in his 
study so much impressed M. Bergeret. No, my 
friend's piece of wicker-work was proudly exhib- 
ited to all eyes; and she was as eager to tell as we 
were to hear the story. 

The limb had been devised and fashioned for 
his own use by a humble French soldier, a crippled 
pdlu. To while away tedious months in a hospital 
ward he had learned basket-work. And as his 
wounded comrades, limping to his bedside, 
groaned over the heaviness and discomfort of the 
surgical appliances they wore, there flashed 
through this man's brain the thought: "Why 
should I not out of these willow-wands fashion legs 
as well as baskets?" So he experimented on him- 
self. In four days, and with an outlay of eight 
francs, the leg was made — light, with cushioned 
lining, adapting itself and fitting like a glove with- 
out strap or buckle. His thoughtful benefactress, 
our hostess, at once patented the invention for him. 
After lunch she introduced to us the inventor, 
proudly wearing his own invention. 

At another time all Paris would be talking of 
the miracles of medicine and surgery worked dur- 
ing the War. In 1916 people were flocking out to 
Issy-les-Moulineaux to see Dr. Barthe de Sanfort 



TALKS BY THE WAY 75 

healing burns and frostbites with his soothing wax, 
known as Ambrine. Then Parisians journeyed to 
Compiegne to see Dr. Carrel's new treatment of 
wounds. In 1917 they were passing round a series 
of photographs illustrating the astounding opera- 
tions known as "Siamese Grafting" ^ that Dr. Lau- 
rent was performing at le Grand Palais, Instead 
of wasting the projecting fragments of bone which 
it is frequently necessary to remove from the stump 
after a limb's amputation, Dr. Laurent unites the 
patient with the superfluous bone to another suf- 
fering from the lack of just that osseous morsel. 
And when, after the lapse of some days, the bone 
of A has grown into that of B, the doctor effects 
an amputation which sets the patients free of 
one another. 

In 1918 Dr. Laurent's experiments on the 
heart provided Parisians with yet another sensa- 
tion, opening up a still wider vista of life. For he 
is said to have restored the heart beats of a dead 
dog by introducing into it a large blood vessel of 
a living animal. 

Each change of ministry opened the flood-gates 
of conversation, and recalled Mr. Henry James's 

^ Siamese Grafting is only new in the sense of being applied 
to bone. In connection with the soft parts it dates back al- 
most to the Middle Ages. 



76 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

remark that every French dinner-party resembles 
a meeting of the National Convention. 

I happened to be in Paris in the autumn of 
1917, vrhen M. Clemenceau was forming his 
government. Arriving a little early at a luncheon 
party, I found my hostess seated at her telephone. 
At the other end of the wire was an under-secretary 
of the former ministry, who gave her the names 
of the members of the new cabinet as they were 
nominated. Consequently, when a few minutes 
later several ex-ministers arrived they learnt from 
their hostess who were their successors. The talk 
that morning was all of Clemenceau. Ever full in 
the limelight, "the Tiger," as he is called, has long 
been one of the most picturesque figures of French 
life. Probably more stories have been told about 
him than of any other living Frenchman. One of 
the best relates to his early years, when he was 
combining with the practice of a medical man the 
functions of INIayor of Montmartre. The double 
career led to some confusion. One morning, much 
pressed for time, M. le Maire-Docteur, rushing 
into his consulting-room, found two men awaiting 
him and took them both for patients. "While I 
talk to this gentleman, you, sir, may undress," said 
Dr. Clemenceau. The second monsieur, somewhat 
amazed, but hypnotised into obedience, did as he 



TAI.KS BY THE WAY 77 

was told. It was only after a shivering quarter of 
an hour that he had his first chance to explain 
that what he wanted was employment in the Post 
Office. 

M. Clemenceau has always enjoyed the reputa- 
tion of a wit. And the foundation of his ministry 
provided him with more than one mot! Not a 
bad one was made at the expense of M. Leygues, 
the new Minister of Marine. M. Leygues, in re- 
turn for certain services rendered, is said to have 
become the legatee (legataire) of Henriot, pro- 
prietor of the JNIagasins du Louvre. Asked why 
he had made Leygues Minister of the Navy, 
Clemenceau replied : Je ne pouvais pas laisser Ley- 
gues a terre {legataire) — "I could not leave Ley- 
gues on land." 

During my next visit "Big Bertha" was busy 
at work. The German newspapers were describ- 
ing the population of the capital as fleeing in teiTor, 
and the rare Parisians who remained as waiting 
trembling with fright for the entrance of the con- 
queror. I failed to perceive of any such panic. 
The first explosion I heard was on Good Friday, 
as I was crossing the Place Vendome. It was the 
shell which wrecked the church of St. Gervais. The 
first two persons I spoke to afterwards happened 
to be men — and not Frenchmen. Kindly consid- 



78 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

erate of feminine nerves, one tried to convince me 
that the firing came from a French gun which was 
practising, the other that there had been no ex- 
plosion at all. 

Much less considerate was an aristocratic French 
lady with whom I was talking a few minutes later. 
She casually let fall the remark, "You hear la 
grosse caisse has begun to fire again." I bore this 
brutal announcement, as well, perhaps even better, 
than might have been expected. And summing 
up my courage, went on to spend the evening with 
two Englishwomen, who were far too concerned 
about the great offensive to discuss at any length 
the firing of a few shells into Paris. 

On the next day, a Saturday, while I was cashing 
a cheque at my bank, there was an especially reso- 
nant explosion. Standing round the corner were 
three or four men and a woman clerk. The same 
expression was on every face. We looked at one 
another with sardonic smiles, as if to say, "There 
is no doubt about that." 

At the next thud, a French girl serving at a 
shop counter remarked quietly: "I hope they are 
not firing in the Fontainebleau direction. My 
grandfather lives there. He is all I have in the 
world. For myself it does not matter." "You 



TALKS BY THE WAY 79 

should not talk like that," firmly remonstrated one 
of her colleagues. 

All day long, from one of the most seriously 
threatened quarters, a stalwart young French 
chaufFeuse — who, by the way, is the great-grand- 
daughter of Victor Hugo — was fetching to the 
shelters prepared for them outside the city the 
children of refugees — now, many of them for the 
second time, flocking into Paris. 

A charming young mother, who was away in 
the south when the bombardment opened, leaving 
her husband behind, hurried back to Paris to her 
baby boy, who was there with his nurse. 

On Sunday, at the sound of the first shell, I 
overheard a concierge say: "Ah! I thought they 
would not leave us in peace to-day. But it is quite 
right we should know what war is like and what 
the little ones [les petits) have to bear at the 
front." 

No fear of shells deterred Parisians from going 
out to the Bois on Easter Monday. 

If the enemy thought to terrify Paris into desir- 
ing a peace without victory, he was never more 
utterly mistaken. 

"All the cowards and useless people have left 
Paris," wrote my friend from her hospital during 
the July bombardment. "The city was never so 



80 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

agreeable. For those who remain are all good- 
tempered and cheerful." 

The tide of British popularity in France has 
ebbed and flowed throughout the War. Probably 
we have never been in higher favour than in the 
days following the first battle of the Marne. 
"How glad I am to find myself with your brave 
compatriots in the great battle we are fighting for 
justice and liberty," wrote a French officer to me 
in October, 1914. "Had it not been for our valiant 
Allies, Arras would have shared the fate of poor 
Rheims," wrote another. 

Alighting from a taxi-cab in Paris, I found my- 
self with nothing in my purse save two sous and a 
gold twenty-franc piece. I showed the latter to 
the driver, and asked for change: "What, 
madame," he exclaimed, "a piece of gold!" "Yes!" 
I replied; "this was given me in London, at Cook's. 
You don't see much gold here, I imagine." "No," 
he answered, "and over there your gold must be 
getting scarce. You are spending so much of it, 
and all for us." 

As the War went on, as the French losses in- 
creased and the strain on all their resources became 
severe, they grew a little impatient of us, espe- 
cially as they failed to understand why we did not 
at once adopt universal military service. Certain 



TALKS BY THE WAY 81 

newspapers, patriotic no doubt but misguided, 
spared no effort to encourage this state of mind 
among the French. And they succeeded so well 
that, arriving late after a long, tiring journey at 
the house of some French friends, I found myself 
sitting up until the small hours of the morning 
endeavouring to meet the accusations that England 
was half-hearted in the War because she did not 
immediately institute conscription. My explana- 
tions involved so much praise of the British that 
I loathed myself for bragging like a Boche. 

On the whole, however, our French Allies have 
shown a hearty and enthusiastic appreciation of 
all our efforts. Even when, as was inevitable, we 
did not always come up to their expectations, their 
courtesy generally prevented them from express- 
ing their disappointment in my presence. 

Collaboration in works of mercy and reconstruc- 
tion forms a bond of union between us. One might 
mention many Franco-British labours of love. One 
of them is a Parisian hospital for blind soldiers 
run by a French sisterhood, but which has been 
largely equipped by English ladies. Mrs. Walter 
Heame, the wife of his Majesty's Consul-General 
at Paris, and the Hon. Mrs. Henry Yarde-Buller, 
besides constantly furnishing the hospital wards 
with comforts and luxuries, care for the patients 



82 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

when they leave. They estabHsh many of them 
in homes of their own. Though hardly keeping 
a matrimonial agency, these ladies have been known 
to find wives for some of the departing patients. 
And in these cases they have proved fairy god- 
mothers, including among their benefactions the 
provision of the layette when a baby is expected. 
It is delightful to see the mutual esteem and sym- 
pathy of these Englishwomen and the French 
sisters. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 

The first real sense of the immensity of this 
stupendous world conflict was borne in upon me 
when travelling through the north of France in 
January, 1915. Then I saw on each side of the 
railway once familiar fields being rapidly converted 
into a huge military camp. Interminably, so it 
seemed, a veritable town extended on both sides of 
the line. In our own country, in this fourth year 
of the War, such a sight is not uncommon. In 
France it was to be seen not in the fourth year only, 
but in the fourth month. 

Emerging from this busy scene, from this maze 
of huts and sheds, out into the open fields, those 
broad cultivated stretches such as Millet loved to 
paint, unbroken by any tree or hedgerow, the 
discerning eye might there also detect signs of war. 
Busily intent on agricultural tasks were family 
groups — mother, children, grandparents; but those 
circles were incomplete: the father, the bread-win- 
ner, on whose labour in peace-time the family had 

83 



84 THE FRANCE I KNOAV 

mainly depended, was invariably absent. A voice 
from those fields of France comes to me in a letter 
from a French novelist, Mme. Marcelle Tinayre. 
"It is a moving spectacle," she writes,^ "to see the 
ground being tilled by women and children, who 
are serving their country in their own way. The 
entire rural population, which has given such a 
multitude of combatants to the army,^ is admira- 
ble in its courage and resignation. No one com- 
plains. No one ever utters the word 'Peace.' You 
may tell your friends in England that no wavering 
will come from us, whatever we have to suffer. 
We shall continue to the end to destroy war, if it 
ever can be destroyed." 

Through the length and breadth of France, 
through country and town during these four long 
years, has throbbed the pulse of a mighty resolve. 
And nowhere does it beat more powerfully than 
in the great provincial cities of the' Republic. 
They have given to the Allied Cause some of its 
most energetic and gifted organisers. In fhe first 
rank of these stands an ardent friend of England, 
one who has frequently visited London since the 
War, M. Edouard Herriot, Minister of Transport 

^ La Clairiere — Grosrouvre — Seine et Oise. August 17, 
1915. 

^ For the percentage of peasants in the French army, see 
ante, p. 64 and n. 



THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 85 

towards the end of M. Briand's government in 
1917, representative of the Rhone Department in 
the Senate, and, though he is still young, for eleven 
years Mayor of Lyons. In this country he was 
best known before the War as the author of the 
standard work on that charming Lyonnaise, Mme. 
Recamier. In early years a professor of Greek, he 
may now be regarded as a professor of Energy. 
In a stirring address at the Sorbonne, in February, 
1916, I heard him speak of Lyons as "calm, brave, 
laborious, working with all his heart, energy, and 
will for the glorious day of victory." His words 
fired me with a desire to visit that city. I went 
to Lyons and I found it even as the Mayor had 
said. 

"First to face the truth, and last to leave old 
truths behind," Lyons has ever been in the swirl 
of things. One of the last strongholds of paganism 
and still in this twentieth century, in certain circles, 
clinging to the Catholic Church, it has numbered 
among its citizens the first Christians, the first 
Protestants, the first anti-clericals, the first repub- 
licans, the first communists, the first salonnieres,^ 
the first women university students, and the first 
syndicahsts in France. 

^ In Lyons Louise Labe, in the sixteenth century, estab- 
lished the earliest French salon. 



86 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Now the ancient citj^ is converted into a vast 
arsenal of war, with wagon-loads of munitions 
passing constantly over the light railways laid 
down in the busy streets, along the spacious 
quays and over many of its twenty-two bridges. 

Of all this seething activity the Mayor is at once 
the inspirer and director. Everything centres in 
the palatial seventeenth-century Hotel de Ville, 
once the residence of kings and emperors. The 
whole building is a busy hive of workers. Every 
one of its lofty reception rooms is the scene of 
some branch of war-work. To the clothing of des- 
titute refugees are devoted those grand apartments 
which were the abode of Napoleon III and the 
Empress Eugenie when they were at Lyons. Little 
would our British mayors and town councillors, 
who, at M. Herriot's invitation, visited Lyons 
shortly before the War, now recognise the salle des 
fetes where they were entertained with so much 
brilliance. For that magnificent reception hall is 
now completely transformed : it is a vast work-room 
where ladies of the city, directed by the Mayoress, 
pack the five hundred parcels which Lyons 
despatches daily to French prisoners of war and 
soldiers at the front. 

There is no town in the world, not even Paris, 
where patriotism is more of a religion than Lyons. 



THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 87 

And the Lyonese, therefore, can have felt it no 
desecration to convert the chapel adjoining the 
salle des fetes into a veritable larder, to store it with 
slabs of bread, tins of meat, jars of jam, fringes 
of sausages, all destined for the defenders of 
la patrie. 

When the War broke out the townhall was about 
to be invested with a peal of bells. The bells 
themselves were ready, so also was the mechanism 
of the belfry; but the latter, alas! had been made 
in Belgium, where it fell into the hands of les 
Boches, Consequently the city remains without 
its carillon. 

From the Hotel de Ville all kinds of war 
activities radiate through the city. Second to 
none is that re-education of the wounded in which 
Lyons has led the way. 

The first school of re-education in France was 
the "Ecole Joffre," opened under the authority of 
the Lyons Municipal Council on December 16, 
1914. It is situated in a historic house, formerly 
the seat of a religious order in the Rue Rachais. 
Later a second school was opened at Tourvielle, 
on that superb height of Fourvieres, rising one 
thousand two hundred feet above the sea, 
crowned by the miracle-working image of Notre 



88 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Dame and dominating Lyons as Fiesole does 
Florence. 

Wlien I visited these two institutions in Febru- 
ary, 1916, some four hundred crippled men were 
receiving instruction in gardening, toy-making, 
shoe-making, book-binding, book-keeping, modern 
languages, tailoring, surgical instrument-making, 
and even wireless telegraphy. While I was at 
La Rachais school there came into the office 
a professor of Esperanto, who proposed to open a 
course on that universal language. What was de- 
cided I don't know. But one would imagine that 
such an idea might appeal to one of the most 
cosmopolitan cities in the world and to the Mayor, 
who, before the War, was an ardent internation- 
alist. Perhaps at La Rachais Esperanto may re- 
place Russian, for I hear that the pupils are finding 
the difficulties of that language almost insuperable. 

The school at Fourvieres is in the fine old farm- 
house of Tourvielle surrounded by some seventeen 
acres of gi'ound. Here, in June, 1915, was insti- 
tuted a horticultural department. At first the 
president, Mme. Monod, daughter-in-law of the 
great historian, the late Gabriel Monod, was not 
sanguine as to the capacity of crippled soldiers for 
heavy outdoor work. She expected to find those 
who had lost an arm or a leg capable of nothing 



THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 89 

but the lighter forms of gardening. Then the diffi- 
culty of procuring labourers for the heavy work 
and the eagerness of the cripples themselves to 
undertake it induced her to let them try. When 
I visited the school they had just dug up and pre- 
pared for the plantation of fruit trees about half 
an acre of ground. And the moral effect of this 
achievement upon the spirits of these heroic workers 
shown on their faces and expressed itself in their 
hopeful talk. They were delighted to find them- 
selves capable of such hard work.^ 

There is another school for re-education four 
miles out of the city. Nestling in the hollow of the 
beautiful Lyonnais Mountains is the Agricultural 
College of Sandar, now run in connection with 
the South-Eastern Agricultural Syndicate. There 
I saw numbers of stalwart young peasants, many 
of whom had sacrificed a hand or an arm in their 
country's service, rising superior to their infirmities 
by means of various locally manufactured con- 
trivances, which enabled them to clip hedges, hoe 
turnips, plant or dig up vegetables, and perform 
many other agricultural tasks. One healthy-look- 
ing youth, whose right arm had been amputated, 

^ For further details concerning these schools, see The 
Treatment of Disabled and Discharged Soldiers in France. 
Report by Captain Sir Henry Norman, M.P. (H.M. Sta- 
tionery Office, 1917. W nett), pp. 17-19- 



90 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

was proud to show me how with one of these In- 
struments he could dig, rake, hoe, and, when his 
work was done, throw his tool over his shoulder 
like any two-armed man. The scientific training, 
which for the first time in his life he had received 
at the college, filled him with new hope for the 
future. Though belonging to that class of peas- 
ant proprietors which in France is generally in- 
separable from its native soil, he declared his in- 
tention of emigrating. *'Our bit of land in 
Meurthe-et-Moselle," he said, *'is not enough for 
my brother and me. I shall go to Morocco." 

It is impossible for me here to describe all the 
various activities of this great city, initiated most 
of them by the Mayor's inventiveness and energy. 
In two other directions, however, we must not 
neglect to follow them. From the beginning of 
the War M. Herriot has realised that the Allies 
in their resistance to Germany must employ the 
economic as well as the military weapon. For the 
use of the former few cities are better equipped 
than Lyons, situated at the cross-roads of France, 
at the junction of numerous landways and water- 
ways, notably of two great rivers, the Rhone and 
the Saone, connecting it at once with Switzerland 
and with the Mediterranean Basin. As a nucleus 
of this economic warfare and as a rival to the Great 



THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 91 

Fair of Leipzig, the Mayor and the manufacturers 
of Lyons conceived the idea of reviving the old 
Fairs of their city. 

It was at a desperate moment of French history, 
during the Hundred Years' War, when the English 
invader dominated northern France, that the 
mediaeval Lyons Fair obtained its charter from 
the Dauphin. So now, the revival of the Fair 
takes place during another great war, and is in- 
itiated also at a critical period of the struggle, in 
March, 1916, during the heroic defence of Verdun. 

"While busy over our preparations," wrote the 
Mayor,^ "we trembled. In our brief intervals of 
leisure, we bent anxiously over the military map; 
Douaumont, Vaux, Bethincourt, sacred names, 
how our hearts leaped at the sight of them ! Never- 
theless not unconnected appeared the heroic drama 
over there and our commercial battle. Less glori- 
ously, yet not without merit, we pursue the same 
object: we strive to liberate and protect the spirit 
of France, her products and her labour." 

When I visited the city, preparations for the 
first Fair were well advanced. Gracefully con- 
structed booths in light woods already lined the 
banks of both rivers. Manufacturers of the Allied 
and Neutral countries showed themselves eager to 

^Agir, by Edouard Herriot (Payot, 1917), p. 395 



92 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

take advantage of this opportunity of displaying 
their wares and of increasing their business. No 
less than 1342 took part: 1199 were French, one 
Alsatian, fourteen British, four Canadian, forty- 
three Italian, seventy-three Swiss, two Spanish, 
one Dutch, one Russian. The brilliant success of 
the 1916 Fair, as well as those of the two succeed- 
ing years, surpassing all the hopes of its promoters, 
proves that this institution has come to stay. The 
Fair contributes to raise high that tide of business 
prosperity which began to flow in Lyons after the 
depression of the first few months of the war. 
Towards the end of 1915 the silk industry, largely 
through American and British purchases, revived 
amazingly, the majority of the looms thrown out 
of action on the outbreak of war resumed work, and 
those that remained were adapted to the woolen 
industry, so that Lyons is rapidly taking the place 
of Roubaix, once the French Bradford, now in Ger- 
man occupation. 

It is not surprising that this enterprising city, 
which never closes its eyes to the main chance, 
should have been one of the first to make good 
use of its German prisoners. They are now busy 
on works of construction, which strikes had con- 
siderably retarded before the War, for Lyons is 
the stronghold of syndicalism. Two hundred 



THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 93 

prisoners I saw at work on an enormous stadium 
on the Rhone bank a Httle way out of the town. 
It was one of the Mayor's flashes of genius to set 
*'his Boches/' as he calls them, to this task, which, 
he says, is to be "War's gift to Peace." For here 
in the race-courses which the enemy himself is con- 
structing, in the football fields, gymnastic grounds, 
tennis courts, in the raised seats for fifteen thou- 
sand men, with promenades for another twenty- 
five thousand, the Boche must see that France, far 
from being exhausted, is preparing to amuse her- 
self on a stupendous scale after victory. 

I hardly know which interested me the most — 
the colossal circle of the stadium, looming like an- 
other Colosseum out of the river mist, or the camp 
of its constructors. The prisoners looked well and 
sturdy. Their rations are those of the French sol- 
dier. Responding to the word of command, when 
we entered the long sheds where they sleep and 
eat, they stood to attention, each man at the foot 
of his mattress. Dogged brutality was stamped on 
most faces, defiance on a few, but some appeared 
merely sheepish, while one, tall, thin, with blue 
eyes gazing benevolently from behind spectacles, 
looked the typical German professor, a veritable 
Teufelsdrockh. Even in captivity Germans can- 
not exist without music, and the prisoners showed 



04 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

me the violins they had themselves ingeniously- 
fashioned out of nothing but cardboard. 

Bound to England by close commercial ties, we 
number among the citizens of Lyons some of our 
most faithful friends in France. They have shown 
their appreciation of England's part in the War 
by naming one of their bridges after Lord Kitch- 
ener and by erecting a hospital in memory of Nurse 
Cavell. The Mayor never tires of impressing upon 
the Lyonese the importance to world civilisation of 
the continuance of the Entente after the War. 



CHAPTER VIII 

IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 

During a quite recent visit to Paris it was my 
good fortune to be entertained by a French lady, 
whose house is an intellectual centre. Having 
been temporarily forbidden by her doctor to use 
her eyes, she was accustomed to spend every 
evening after dinner cutting the new volumes re- 
ceived from her bookseller. Every evening her 
swift paper-knife went in and out among the pages, 
laying them open for her secretary to scan in the 
morning and to mark the passages which her liseuse 
would read aloud in the afternoon. New books 
were always pouring in. Neither scarcity of la- 
bour and paper nor the proximity of the Germans 
to the capital seemed to stem the tide. JNIany are 
writing books, and to facilitate their distribution 
and sale in these difficult war-days French pub- 
lishers resort more and more to co-operation. They 
are grouping themselves into various societies, the 
most important of which is la Societe d'E asportation 
des Ilditions Fran^aises, including most of the large 

95 



96 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

publishing firms, and issuing a monthly catalogue. 
There has also lately been inaugurated in the 
Boulevard St. Michel an enterprising publish- 
ing house and agency, la Renaissance du Livre, 
which supplies booksellers with new books and 
which issues monthly a lively and useful little leaf- 
let, calling itself "Organe de Bibliographic et de 
Bibliophilie." Now in March every year, at the 
great Lyons Fair,^ instituted in 1916 as a rival to 
the Leipzig Fair, representatives of these and other 
societies, together with authors and printers, meet 
in Congress, le Congres du Livre.^ 

To do anything like justice to the increasing 
stream of new books within the narrow limits of 
this chapter is, of course, impossible. We can only 
dive down here and there into the flood, bringing 
up a miscellaneous packet of prose books and book- 
lets, and concluding with a handful of novels. With 
regard to poetry we must content ourselves with 
referring the reader to Mr. Edmund Gosse's ad- 
mirable articles on contemporary French poets 
which have appeared from time to time in the 
* 'Edinburgh Review." 

More perhaps than ever before in France is 

^ See ante, pp. 91^ 92. 

" See VAvenir du Livre Frangais, by M. Louis Hachette, 
a director of the great publishing house. ("Revue des Deux 
Mondes/' May 1, 1917.) 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 97 

there a tendency to issue books in series. One of 
the most sohd of these, which Professor Charles 
Andler is editing for Alcan, deals with aspects of 
Pan-Germanism. Appealing to a more popular 
public are the numerous war-series of Berger 
Levrault and M. Bernard Grasset's informative 
weekly 75 cent, pamphlets, "le Fait de la Semaine," 
treating of public affairs, both at home and abroad. 
Here eminent authors discuss such domestic prob- 
lems as the ideal police or tell their readers what 
they ought to know about the history of Alsace- 
Lorraine or political developments during the War 
in the Near East, the great European countries, 
and America. 

While M. Grasset's publications represent the 
opinions of the Left, those of the Right find ex- 
pression in the books of la Grande Librairie Na- 
tionale. Here M. Charles Maurras, that gifted 
contributor to the royalist newspaper, "F Action 
Fran^aise," with his customary dogmatism, lays 
down the conditions of victory in four volumes. 

The melting-pot into which this War has 
plunged the state system of Europe, inevitably 
calls for numerous works on diplomacy. Some are 
retrospective like the Commandant Weil's two 
large volumes, les Dessous du Congres de Vienne 
(Payot), others prospective like the solution to 



98 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

the Turkish question propounded by the anony- 
mous author of le Prohleme Turc (Fayard) ^ others 
again combine the two points of view. To this 
last class belong three illuminating works from the 
pen of a brilliant diplomatist, M. Auguste Gerard, 
sometime French Ambassador in China and later 
in Japan. In la Triple Entente et la Guerre (Cal- 
mann Levy), Nos Allies en Extreme Orient 
(Payot), Ma Mission en Chine (Plon), to be fol- 
lowed almost immediately by Ma Mission en 
Japan, M. Gerard describes the significance in the 
past of the entrance of these two great eastern 
powers into the arena of world politics and the 
significance for the future of Germany's exclusion, 
since the War, from the Pacific Basin. 

In France, as in England, the importance of 
forming a League or Society of Nations is regard- 
ed as second only to the winning of the War. On 
this subject two suggestive pamphlets have recently 
appeared : one, les Principes de la Societe des Na- 
tions, by M. Ferdinand Buisson, the President of 
the League of the Rights of Man, and another, la 
Societe des Nations, by a distinguished barrister, 
M. Andre Mater. 

^ In the English translation The Turkish Enigma (Chatto & 
Windus), the author. Count Leon Ostrorog, emerges from his 
anonymity. 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 99 

In the latter we find a much more detailed and 
comprehensive scheme for the construction of an 
international state system than is contained in any 
English publication on this all-important theme, 
at least than any other with which I am acquainted. 
]\I. Mater is also the author of another well-docu- 
mented work, Projet de Legislation sur les 
Operations et Ameliorations d'hiteret Collectif, 
which, with other works on the same subject — for 
example, IM. Andre JNIacaigne's Notre France 
d'apres Guerre, will be of considerable value when 
the time comes to rebuild the civilisation which now 
seems falling about our ears. 

That harvest of new books through which wan- 
dered my hostess's deft fingers, on those spring 
evenings, included several reprints and translations. 
When she came to the reminiscences of her friend 
Renan in Jules Lemaitre's posthumous volume of 
Contemporains {Societe Franfaise d'Imprimerie 
et de Librairie) , the book-cutter had hard work not 
to disobey her doctor's orders. The progress of 
the knife slackened, to quicken again when she 
took up the weighty volume of Sidney Webb's 
History of Trade Unions, translated by an ex- 
Under Secretary of Blockade, the late ]M. Albert 
Metin. But there was another audible slackening 
when the turn came of Mr. Britling, with his 



100 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

French title of M, Britling commence a voir clear, ^ 

Mr. Wells' novel was the only new work of 
fiction I saw in that house. Its mistress, though a 
friend of many distinguished novelists — of Flau- 
bert and of Victor Hugo, for example — has possi- 
bly never been gi-eatly addicted to novel reading. 
Xow, at any rate, the actualities of this life-and- 
death struggle so completely absorb her as to leave 
neither time nor inclination for works of pure 
imagination. 

But we English readers who would know 
France in war-time cannot afford to neglect her 
war-time novels. For in the France of to-day it is 
as it has ever been — or at least for two centuries: 
the novel presents the clearest and the most faith- 
ful picture of the nation's life and thought. 

On the covers of to-day's novels we seek in vain 
certain names constantly recurring in times of 
peace : most conspicuous by its absence, as we have 
already indicated, is the name of Anatole France. 

In the immense output of war-novels other 
familiar signatures, however, we find in abundance : 
Abel Hermant, the IMargueritte Brothers, who 
now write separately, J. H. Rosny (aine) , IMarcel 
Prevost, the Tharauds, Tinayre ; and then the long 

^ Since the appearance of this translation in volume, it 
has been running as a serial in the daily newspaper^ "I'Hu- 
manite." 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 101 

procession of the B's (strange the persistence of 
that initial among French novelists) : Barres, 
Bazin, Bertrand, Bordeaux, Boulenger, Bourget/ 
Boylesve. And side by side with those are new 
names — the B again: Barbusse and Benjamin, but 
also Geraldy,^ Jaloux,^ Larbaud,* Marbro, Mey- 
ran, Sonolet.^ 

Let us open four of these novels. And, place 
aux dames, we will begin with Meyran and Marbro, 
both of whom, veiling their identity beneath pseu- 
donyms, have chosen to disguise their sex by the 
ambiguous prenom of "Camille." 

It was inevitable that not in France only, but 
on both sides of the Atlantic, Camille Meyran's 
volume of two war-tales, Gotton Conniocloo and 
VOubliee (Plon Nourrit), should attract consider- 
able attention. For this writer, who, by the way, 
is Taine's grandniece, contrives to blend with a 
fine and delicate literary art a faculty for bold, 
impressive description, and what Carlyle calls 
''creative perspicacity." Certain figures and scenes 

^ For Bourget*s war novels, le Sens de la Mort, Lazarine, 
Nemesis, see "la Revue Hebdomadaire/' June 15, 1918, article 
by Felicien Pascal. 

^ La Guerre Madame, published anonymously in France, 
but signed in its English version. 

^ Fumees dans la Campagne, par Edmond Jaloux. 

^ Enfantines, par Valery Larbaud. 

® Pout tuer le Cafard, par Louis Sonolet. 



102 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

in these stories stand out like some Italian primi- 
tive, so simple is their drawing, so magical their 
presentment. They fix themselves in the mind's 
eye: the austere. Puritanical Connixloo, bell-ringer 
and cobbler, his voluptuous, motherless daughter 
Gotton, who is fair as a Rubens model, her meeting 
in the harvest-field with her broad-shouldered, lame 
lover, Luc, the blacksmith, the idyll of their pas- 
sion, with its tempestuous undertone, ever threat- 
ening the tragedy, which ultimately flames forth 
and attains horrible but heroic consummation dur- 
ing and partly through the horrors of the German 
invasion. Then, winding through it all, there 
persists that conflict, old as humanity, between the 
flesh and the spirit, between Gotton's sensuality, 
which comes to her from her beautiful mother, and 
the ascetic's craving for martyrdom which she had 
inherited from her father. 

Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book 
is where the childless Gotton receives into her home 
her lover's five children, rescued from unspeakable 
terrors after their mother had fallen a victim to the 
invader's frightfulness. Gotton fed them. Gotton 
undressed them, kissed them and put them all five, 
side by side, into her bed. She and Luc slept on 
the floor. But every quarter of an hour she rose to 
look at the children as they slumbered, the eldest 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 103 

flushed, restless, feverish, the others sleeping peace- 
fully. With the barren woman's child-hunger, she 
gazes caressingly on their infantile beauty, on the 
gold and auburn curls mingling on the pillow. The 
thought strikes her that in a few days they might 
forget her who had borne and suckled them, that 
they might even transfer their affections to their 
father's mistress. "But no," she reflects, "that 
would be impossible." And, rather than stand be- 
tween the father and his children, Gotton, in an act 
of supreme self-sacrifice, effaces herself. "Having 
gone to the remotest extremity of love, she likewise 
went to the remotest extremity of expiation." The 
tragedy is too long to be told here. But it is in 
effect this: taking upon herself the burden of an- 
other's deed, she offers herself up as a scapegoat 
and by her death delivers her village out of the 
invader's avenging hand. 

On a plane less heroic, though not less pathetic, 
is the second story in this book, the tragedy of 
VOuhliee, the orphan girl, isolated in a town occu- 
pied by the enemy. Repatriated by the invader, on 
her return to Paris she finds her lover married to 
another woman. 

Camille Marbro's le Surivant (Fayard) chal- 
lenges comparison not only, as the preface indicates, 
with VEnigme de Givreuse, by J. H. Rosny 



104 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

(aine), but with an English novel, Miss Rebecca 
West's Return of the Soldier, 

While Miss West's story deals with that phe- 
nomenon with which the War is rendering us 
familiar, with a lapse of memory and its embar- 
rassing results, Camille Marbro treats of something 
even less explicable, something which in more ordi- 
nary times one might incline to regard as prepos- 
terous. 

Yet in these days when we realise as never before 
that "we are such stuff as dreams are made of," 
may we not regard with indulgence the boldest 
flights of the imagination into that unexplored, 
shadowy and mysterious region of our being, 
whence flow tendency, inclination, all that we define 
as temperament! With such elusive things is con- 
cerned Camille Marbro's remarkable psychological 
study. In the case of Miss West's soldier, memory 
retrogrades fifteen years. In the French novel one 
man's memory persists in another's body. A bullet 
carries a fragment of the brain of a dead lieutenant, 
Jacques Breton, into the skull of his friend, the 
sub-lieutenant. Marcel Lauret. The fragment 
apparently bears with it the mind of its original 
proprietor, Breton, which henceforth inhabits and 
dominates Lauret's body. Consequently the reader 
is confronted by an unheard-of phenomenon, a most 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 105 

curious personality, one in which the mind is 
Breton's, while the body and its senses are Lauret's. 
What happens to Lauret's mind under these fan- 
tastic conditions we are not told. But there are 
indications that it had never before been very active. 

The author makes the best of this anomalous 
situation, using it to reveal facts of a deep psycho- 
logical significance, cleverly tracing the twists and 
turns, the shocks and surprises of human tem- 
perament. 

First, she describes how this astounding and 
perplexing transformation gradually dawns upon 
Jacques Breton (for, all through, the living per- 
sonality is distinctly Breton's) as, in Lauret's body, 
he lies in his hospital bed and emerges from pro- 
longed unconsciousness. 

His brain whirls, that is, the old brain in the new 
body. Yet he does not lose his reason. But, 
fearing to be thought mad, he never confides the 
terrible truth to a single soul. Every one persists 
in regarding him, the serious, reserved Jacques 
Breton, if such we may still call him, as being in 
reality the much more sensuous, impetuous and 
virile Marcel Lauret. In the semblance of Marcel 
Lauret, Breton woos and marries his own wife, 
acts as stepfather to his own child and grows 
jealous of himself because his wife loves her new 



106 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

husband with a more passionate ardour than she 
had ever displayed to the old. But subtler still 
than this situation is the battle which Jacques 
Breton's cold-blooded soul, if one may use such a 
term, has to wage with Marcel Lauret's ardent 
physical desires, which are, alas! sexual and 
alcoholic. 

Of such a cruel enigma no solution is possible 
this side of the grave. And the story breaks off 
where this dual personality returns to the war. 

An equally puzzling enigma is that of Givreuse 
by J. H. Bosny {aine) ^ Here, briefly, if we 
follow it, is the story : Pierre de Givreuse, a soldier 
wounded on the western front, drags himself in a 
fainting condition into the neighbouring laboratory 
of an obscure but marvellously gifted physicist, 
Antoine de Grantaigle. This man of science, after 
years of experimental research, had acquired 
powers as amazing as any ever attributed by the 
credulous to mediaeval sorcerer or magician. He 
had learnt, by means of mysterious electric currents 
or energies, to effect wonderful bipartitions, at 
least, as far as atoms were concerned. But Pierre 
de Givreuse is to experience to his undoing that this 
faculty may extend further than to mere atoms. 
Shortly after his arrival in Grantaigle's laboratory, 

^ L'Enigme de Givreuse (Flainmarion). 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 107 

an exploding shell destroys the chateau, buries the 
physicist beneath its ruins, but leaves a reduplicated 
Pierre de Givreuse to be, in his bifurcated person, 
one being in two distinct bodies, the hero or the 
heroes of this astounding story. 

In roughly summarising it thus, we have begun 
at the end, by accounting in a measure for the 
mystery, which the author artistically leaves unex- 
plained to the tantalised reader until the last pages 
of the novel. 

Rosny has been called the French H. G. Wells. 
That is to pay him a great compliment; for in 
few of his books does he attain to the convincing, 
enthralling power of his English contemporary. 
While possessed of a powerful imagination, he has 
not the faculty of carrying one along on its wings. 
He rarely succeeds in gripping the reader. Like 
the author of God, the Invisible King, he gi-ows 
more and more occupied with the Beyond or the 
Perhaps. But his mechanical theory of Immortali- 
ty, hinted at in this novel, fails to excite our 
curiosity, or to make us pant with impatience for 
the promised further development of the theory. 

We now leave these mysteries of consciousness 
and identity for more solid ground. One of the 
latest elected to a seat among "the Immortals," M. 
Rene Boylesve (whose real name is Tardiveau), 



108 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

gives us a novel, Tu nes' plus rien (Albin Michel). 

Unlike the collection of short and slight stories, 
Cinq sous de Bonheur (Calmann Levy), which 
preceded it and which was hardly worthy of the 
author, this book may be ranked with Madeleine 
Jeune Femme as one of M. Boylesve's best and 
most characteristic works. 

First, we must congratulate the author on his 
title. It fits the subject like a glove. The heroine, 
Odette, a beautiful young wife, is bereft of her 
adoring husband in one of the earliest engagements 
of the War. In the beginning a complete egoist, 
incapable even in her noblest moments of consider- 
ing anything save in its relation to herself, Odette 
in the end completely reverses that position; she 
comes only to consider her ego in relation to the 
incalculable number of those who are outside it. 
Je ne suis plus rien, she cries: **I am nothing save 
the servant of sorrow." 

The successive steps of this renunciation, com- 
pleted when out of pity Odette marries a blinded 
soldier, the author depicts in his subtlest and most 
delicate manner. It is precisely in this kind of 
treatment that he is always at his best. 

By the way, he casts many a sidelight on the 
French war-time atmosphere both in Paris and in a 
seaside military hospital, modelled doubtless on that 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 10^ 

of Deauville, where the novehst himself worked as 
infirmier during the first months of the War. 

In the portrayal of his secondary characters, he 
penetrates deep into human nature, revealing how 
various are the effects of the War on different tem- 
peraments. He contrasts, for instance, the patri- 
otic Blauve family, who, with marvellous stoicism, 
soar to the pinnacles of self-sacrifice, with the self- 
centred Clotilde, whose one aim is to erect a 
rampart behind which she may shelter from every 
echo of strife. But to my mind — and pace that 
eminent critic of "le Temps," M. Paul Souday,^ 
who finds him a bore — the most interesting char- 
acter in the book is the middle-aged La Villaumer. 
Being beyond military age, Villaumer does what he 
can behind the lines, and, above all, he never ceases 
to observe and to reflect. 

Those who have carefully followed this author's 
work will have no difficulty in recognising in La 
Villaumer's attitude towards life that of M. Boy- 
lesve himself. In a country where partisanship 
runs riot, the new Academician has ever succeeded 
in maintaining his neutrality. As far as religious 
and political factions are concerned, he remains the 
the most unlabelled of living Frenchmen. Yet who 
can entirely escape from every stream of tendency? 

^ Feuilleton "du Temps/' Les Livres, 23 mai_, IQIS. . 



110 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Who can avoid being sucked in by one current of 
thought or another? Among writers in all coun- 
tries both before and during the war, there runs a 
dividing line, on this or that side of which they tend 
to range themselves. His position with regard to 
such a line may be indicated by an author's answer 
to this question: Which should one venerate most 
in the conflict of diverging human tendencies — the 
heart or the head, reason or instinct, intelligence 
or sentiment? While such authors as Anatole 
France and Julien Benda are on the side of reason, 
writers like Barres declare openly for the heart, 
instinct, sentiment. They glorify the subconscious 
and set little store on intelligence, considering it 
quite superficial because of recent development in 
humanity's evolution. 

Boylesve takes a middle course. Through La 
Villaumer, he reminds his readers that he has al- 
ways prized intelligence above everything. But at 
the same time he renounces the hope that it can 
ever govern mankind. "Cruelty, absurdity, in- 
justice, superstition, the shedding of rivers of 
blood," he believes, "may be the inevitable condi- 
tions of that mystery which we admire under the 
name of Life,'' ^ If such be humanity's unhappy 

^ Compare a passage in Professor Gilbert Murray's Presi- 
dential Address to the Classical Association, Religio Gramma- 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 111 

lot, what remains for it, he asks, but to fall back 
upon the heart and to cultivate its virtues, affection 
and pity ? ^ 

A more pronounced, though hardly a more hope- 
ful devotee of intelligence is Henri Barbusse, whose 
books are more discussed than any which have 
appeared in France since the war. 

Before August, 1914, few had heard of him. It 
was the brilliant success of his war-book, le Feu, 
which made him suddenly famous, and encouraged 
him to re-publish two volumes which had already 
appeared before the War: a philosophical novel, 
VEnfer (1908), and a collection of short stories. 
Nous Autres (1914). 

To the grey monotone of Boylesve's work it 
would be difficult to discover a more glaring con- 
trast than the pages of VEnfer^ which are almost 
as lurid as the title. 

Not a few British readers will consider this book, 
as indeed its title might suggest, to be nothing more 
or less than satanic. They will be tempted to treat 
it as Lord Morley in his Recollections, tells us that, 

tici, p. 47 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918), where he writes 
of "man's way onward to the great triumph or the great 
tragedy/* 

^ The eighteenth-century moralist, Vauvenargues, harmon- 
ised the two opinions when he wrote: "Great thoughts pro- 
ceed from the heart." In other words: to be truly great 
thought must be fired with emotion. 



112 THE FRANCE I KXOW 

during a railway journey, he treated several French 
novels: he threw them out of the carriage window, 
devoutly hoping that the dwellers in that country- 
side did not know how to read. We wonder whether 
VEnfer, despite its Zolaesque audacity, would thus 
have suffered in Lord Morley's hands. At any 
rate we happen to know that one English pub- 
lisher, at least, has refused an English version. On 
the other hand, from Maeterlinck and Anatole 
France it wins high praise. Few, however, will 
deny that one needs to be the most ultra of realists 
to tolerate the intrusion into a work of art of long 
passages only suitable for some pathological or 
biological treatise, such, for example, as those which 
describe in detail the preying upon the human body 
of various forms of cancer and the progress of 
decomposition in cemeteries. 

The obsessing sexuahty of the book one may 
regard as symptomatic of that exaggeration which 
the author makes one of his characters find so 
^'fruitful in discussion." 

Despite the hero's assertion si je suis trouble au 
contact des amours, c'est a cause d'une grande 
pensee et non pas d'vm. instinct, one doubts whether 
it is mind alone that renders it impossible for him 
to look at a woman without hearing within himself 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 113 

the sex cry, without conceiving what he calls un 
affreux commencement du bonheur. 

These important reservations, however, do not 
shake our conviction that no one honestly concerned 
with ultimate questions will fail to be favourably 
impressed by the candour and boldness with which 
they are faced in this book. It is this courage, the 
courage of Rabelais, Voltaire, Renan, Anatole 
France and many others, combined with a radiant 
lucidity of mind which renders the best French 
literature the most thought-compelling in the world. 
In this book, Barbusse, with relentless scalpel, 
seeks to lay bare Vimpudeur de la verite, to shame 
"the angels' veiling wings." He probes deep into 
the mysteries of life, birth, love, disease, and death. 
His hero, a bank-clerk, looking through a chink in 
his hotel bedroom wall, observes them as they are 
enacted in an adjoining chamber. They suggest 
to him deeper problems still, questions of the divine, 
the infinite, of Paradise, and Hell. He tries to 
free them from the bondage of tradition. He en- 
deavours, succeeding all too well, to strip from 
them every convention of piety and of decency. He 
aims at constituting himself a weigher of hearts. 
And all the while he is haunted by a sense of mere- 
ly losing himself on the surface of things. Tepele 



114 THE FRANCE I KNO^V 

le profond de la vie, mais je me sens perdu a la 
surface du monde. 

While, through his hole in the wall, he witnesses 
secret things, while he listens to the cry of the flesh 
and watches its recoil, he also overhears philosophic 
discussions; he observes illusions dominant, then 
decaying; he becomes convinced of the unceasing 
changeableness and the utter loneliness of man. 

And what is the conclusion of the whole matter? 
Nothing either new or really final. It may be 
summarised in Descartes' axiom: Je pense done 
je suis. Beyond that dictum Barbusse refuses to 
go. Assuming what he calls a Kantian attitude, he 
writes: Je ne sais, si Vunivers a en dehors de moi 
une realite quelconque. Ce que je sais, c'est que 
la realite na lieu que par Vintermediaire de ma 
pensee, et que tout d'ahord, il n'existe que par Videe 
que j'en ai. 

This book, wherein man has often appeared little 
better than a brute wallowing in the toils of sexual 
desire, concludes by exalting him to the position in 
which others place God. 

"We possess the divinity," he writes, "of our 
great suffering. And our solitude, with its travail 
of ideas, of tears, of smiles, in its perfect extent 
and radiation is inevitably divine. ... It is the 
realisation of this which glorifies and inspires us. 




M. Henri Bergson 



< 



IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 115 

which beautifies our pride and which in spite of 
everything will console us when we have grown 
accustomed, each in his own poor way, to occupy 
the place which once was God's." 

Already before the War not a few French critics 
pronounced the intellectualist streapi in French 
literature to be running dry. Julien Benda, the 
author of a widely read novel, VOrdination,^ the 
opponent in numerous volumes of Bergson's phi- 
losophy, is one of the ablest French intellectualists 
of to-day. In his last book, les Sentiments de 
Critias/ after proving that the German, with his 
adoration of the will, is the most dangerous enemy 
of intelligence, he writes bitterly: ^ "Ah, I know 
well who to-morrow, in that battle of parties now 
opening, will be the most despised. It will not be 
the Protestant, nor the Catholic, nor the Jew, nor 
the Frenchman, nor even the German ... it will 

^ Emile Paul, 1913. English translation by Gilbert Canaan, 
The Yoke of Pity, 1913. 

2 Emile Paul, 1917- 

^ Page 108. See also Benda's article in the "Figaro," 
June 30, 1917, entitled En Marge d'un Discours, the dis- 
course in question being that delivered by Alfred Capus when 
he was received into the Academy. Here Benda refers to 
the present generation as hostile to the scientific spirit toute 
reverente de mysticite et de lyrisme, adding, *'But we dare 
not presume to j udge it, for one thing dominates all others : it 
has saved France." 



116 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

be the Intellectualist." But may not the attention 
now aroused by the republication of VEnfer — a 
work ignored on its first appearance ten years ago 
— indicate a turning of the tide? 



CHAPTER IX 

POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 

Nowhere do differences of opinion cut more 
deeply than in France. This is because the French 
are a serious nation. Their intensity of feehng is 
no less than their lucidity and audacity of thought. 
They cannot understand our Anglo-Saxon in- 
difference and phlegm. They are amazed to hear 
that in England members of hostile political parties 
meet in one another's houses and even break bread 
together. 

In France it was nothing short of a miracle, the 
miracle of Joan of Arc, Veternel miracle franfais 
when, in August, 1914, all differences were sunk, 
when at la patries call every echo of internal strife, 
religious, political, social, was silenced. 

L'union sacree, therefore, is no mere empty term, 
no mere flourish of rhetoric. Had it not existed in 
reality the French would long ago have been out 
of the War. They could never through four in- 
terminable years have resisted the most formidable 
foe it has ever fallen to the lot of any nation to 

117 



118 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

face. Had Vunion sacree not been a fact they must 
inevitably have succumbed ere now to war-weari- 
ness, or fallen a victim to those numerous snares 
laid by the Boches with the intention both of divid- 
ing them among themselves and detaching them 
from their Allies. 

Nevertheless, there are things which even the 
sacred union, even the miracle of Joan of Arc, is 
powerless to accomplish. It cannot blunt the acute- 
ness of the French mind nor dull the intensity of 
French feeling. It cannot make all Frenchmen 
think and feel alike. As long as France remains a 
living nation she will stand "united yet divided." 
As long as Frenchmen think and feel they will 
range themselves in diiFerent political and religious 
camps. 

To give some idea of this varied and often con- 
fused political scene — the religious scene we 
describe in another chapter — ^is the object of the 
following pages. 

First, we must note that in more than one respect 
the world of French politics differs from our own. 
The deputies meeting in the Palais Bourbon do not, 
like those who assemble at Westminster, belong to 
one of two or three great political parties, but 
rather to one among a considerable nimiber of 
groups, which may themselves be subdivided, and 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 119 

which are constantly now breaking off from, now 
merging in, one another. Passing from the conser- 
vative right to the progressive left, we shall find 
this kaleidoscopic character of the political scene 
accentuated and these subdivisions of groups in- 
creasing. There is nothing unusual in such condi- 
tions. For, while it is inevitable for a certain 
uniformity to characterise those who, obedient to 
the voice of habit, tradition, and authority, follow 
the beaten track, it is equally inevitable that idio- 
syncrasies should abound among those bold pioneers 
who in thought and deed venture into "fresh woods 
and pastures new." The energy and initiative of 
the latter frequently proceed from and result in 
combativeness and nonconformity. But this does 
not necessarily weaken their party allegiance. 
*'What I object to in the socialist party is, that you 
lack unity, you are always quarrelling," said a dis- 
tinguished French philosopher in my hearing to a 
well-known socialist lady. "No, my friend," was 
her reply, "you interpret our differences too 
seriously. We resemble a large family, in which 
one or other of the members cannot fail at times to 
be annoying. Some one talks too loud, another 
sneezes, another coughs. It irritates his brothers 
and sisters, they object, rather angrily perhaps. 



120 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

But such trifles are far from destroying the family 
affection or unity." ^ 

Some light on the various shades of opinion in 
the socialist party before the War has been thrown 
by M. Levasseur in his compendious work, Ques- 
tions Ouvrieres,^ But to see them as they appear in 
this fourth year of the War one should read the re- 
ports of the sociahst and syndicalist congresses 
which met in Paris in July, 1918. "Le Journal des 
Debats" ^ presents, from an impartial outsider's 
point of view, an excellent picture of the present 
sections of the socialist party, which appear to have 
superseded the older divisions of Independent and 
Unified referred to later in this chapter. On the 
extreme left we now see a small but noisy group of 
pacifists, or "kienthaliens," so-called because early 
in the War they conferred at Kienthal in Switzer- 
land with certain German socialists. These *'kien- 
thaliens" constitute the extreme wing of the 
minority socialist party, which is led by Longuet. 
Then come the centristes, led by Marcel Cachin, 

^ Nevertheless, as we go to press, there are ominous signs 
of an inevitable split in the socialist party. Whether the 
majoritaires and minoritaires can continue to act together will 
be decided by the great socialist congress summoned for Octo- 
ber. It looks as if the numerical proportions of the sections 
were changing, and as if minoritaires were about to become 
majoritaires. 

2 Rousseau, 1907, p. 387. ' July 17, 1918. 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 121 

and further to the right the majority section led 
by Albert Thomas. This last is represented by 
that powerful newspaper, "rHumanite," which is 
edited by Renaudel. Of a slightly centrist e tinge is 
another socialist daily newspaper, 'THeure," while 
the evening paper, "le Populaire" — edited by Lon- 
guet and inscribed with the words of Anatole 
France in his introduction to Jeanne dfArc, V union 
des travailleurs fera la paix du monde — is frankly 
minoritaire} 

While all, save the "kienthaliens," agree as to 
the importance above everything of la defense 
nationale, the sections differ on the questions of an 
international working-men's conference, advocated 
by Longuet, opposed by Thomas, and of the Allies' 
attitude towards the Bolsheviks, whom the majority 
condemn, sympathising with Kerensky, but with 
whom the minority incline to be sympathetic. 

This War, however, has taught us not to at- 
tribute too great importance to French party di- 
visions. In the face of supreme national danger 
we know they count for little. In France, as in 
England, we have seen old party barriers pulled 
down. We may also discern, if we look closely, 

^ As indicated on the previous page, these terms are now 
reversed: Thomas' party is minoritaire, Longuet's majoritaire. 
Marcel Cachin, instead of Renaudel, now directs "I'Huma- 
nite." 



122 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

new ones being set up. Only the other day we 
heard the conservative Barres, President of the 
League of Patriots, loudly acclaim that stalwart 
radical, the French Prime IMinister, for his cam- 
paign against defaitisme. Coupling the name of 
Clemenceau with that of a fiery patriot with whom 
the Prime Minister once fought a duel, Barres 
cried: *'Long live Clemenceau! Long live 
Deroulede!"' 

Broadly speaking, French political parties seem 
to be at present about seven in number. Passing 
from left to right, they comprise syndicalists, inde- 
pendent socialists, unified socialists, radical social- 
ists, radicals, liberals, or moderate republicans, and 
royalists. 

Familiar to English readers as will be some of 
these terms, others — syndicalists, independent 
socialists, unified socialists, radical socialists — may 
require a few words of explanation. 

Littre, in his great dictionary,^ defines the word 
syndic as "one elected to guard the interests of a 
corporate body. There are syndics in working- 
men's societies." Syndicat he defines as "a union 
of capitalists interested in the same enterprise." But 
since Littre's day the term has been extended to 

^See "Echo de Paris," July 15, 1918. 
2 Ed. 1869. 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 123 

include unions of workmen, in some respects re- 
sembling, but in others widely differing from, our 
trade unions. The term Syndicalisme, which does 
not occur in Littre, has come to denote the policy 
of these various syndicats, united in what is known 
as la Confederation Generale du Travail (gen- 
erally expressed by the letters "C. G. T."), which 
was founded at Limoges in 1895, and which seven 
years later absorbed the Federation des Societes 
OuvriereSj which had been founded in 1880. In the 
C. G. T., representing now no less than one million 
workers, centre the activities and the doctrines of 
syndicalism, voiced by the newspaper, "la Bataille 
Syndicaliste." The avowed object of the move- 
ment before the War was the transference of in- 
dustrial capital from the masters to the men. As a 
means to this end the syndicalists depended not on 
any political machinery, with which they professed 
to have nothing to do, but on direct action through 
strikes, above all through a general strike. During 
the Malvy Trial of August, 1918, M. Jouhaux 
defined the after-war programme of the C. G. T. 
as maocimum de production dans le minimum du 
temps pour le maximum de salaire. 

The division of socialists into Independent and 
Unified formally occurred at the Amsterdam 
Socialist Congress, in 1905, over the question of 



124 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

the participation of socialists in bourgeois govern- 
ments. The independents were those who were 
prepared to participate. Led by Millerand, Briand, 
Viviani, and Augagneur, they withdrew from the 
ranks of their brethren. The latter, under the 
leadership of Jaures, now began to call themselves 
"unified." Meanwhile a large fraction of the radi- 
cal party, which, while still adhering to the princi- 
ple of private ownership, was prepared to go some 
distance in the direction of state socialism, tagged 
the word "socialist" to its title and called itself parti 
radical socialiste. 

The tendency in France for more than a genera- 
tion has been towards grouping together in what is 
known as le bloc some of the least divergent parties. 
On such a union many French ministries have 
depended for their support. And to-day it is not 
difficult to discover a principle on which a group 
of parties otherwise distinct, if not hostile, may 
unite. 

Thus, lOr instance, as recently as April 4, 1918, 
radicals, radical socialists, independent and unified 
socialists and syndicalists, meeting on the common 
platform of a desire to make this the last war, and 
to establish a League of Nations, formed what is 
known as la Coalition Re public aiiie, Sjonpathising 
with if not actually members of the union are the 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 125 

veteran radical and ex-Prime Minister, M. Leon 
Bourgeois, and the socialist leader and ex-Minister 
of Munitions, M. Albert Thomas. Both of sterling 
worth, there are no two men in France who are 
more respected and more influential. M. Bourgeois 
is the author of the first modern French book to 
advocate a League of Nations, Pour la Societe des 
Nations (1910). He is the president of the com- 
mission recently appointed by the French Govern- 
ment to inquire into the conditions under which a 
League of Nations might be formed. M. Albert 
Thomas is well known in England, where we have 
listened to his brilliant oratory and read his illumi- 
nating articles contributed to the London Press. 
In France, the influence he exercises over the 
socialist party entitles him to be regarded as the 
successor of his friend Jaures, with whom he col- 
laborated in that monumental work VHistoire du 
Socialisme, 

But to go further back. During the first six 
years of this century a union between the various 
socialist parties and the syndicalists succeeded in 
forcing the Government to carry out a series of 
labour reforms : viz. the establishment of an eleven- 
hour day, of a weekly rest-day, of compulsory 
assistance for the aged and incurable, of a system 



126 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

of old age pensions, and, most important of all, 
of a labour ministry. 

At the same time there are — or there were before 
the War — now, as we have said, all parties, except 
the kienthalienSj rally to the cry la defense nationale 
d'ahord — political principles which cut athwart 
politics. Such were nationalism and international- 
ism, the struggle between la raison d'Etat, upheld 
by la Ligue des Patriotes, presided over by M. 
Maurice Barres; and les droits de Vhomme, pro- 
fessed by la Ligue des Droits de VHomme et du 
Citoyen, of which M. Ferdinand Buisson is presi- 
dent. The nationalist party, represented by three 
leading newspapers: the royalist "1' Action fran- 
9aise," the republican "Gaulois," and "Echo de 
Paris," included, besides the entire royalist and con- 
servative groups, a large number of moderate re- 
publicans. This republican section of the national- 
ist party is also represented in the Press by "le Fi- 
garo," and to a certain extent by "le Temps," 
though in certain respects, as, for instance, in its 
advocacy of free trade, the latter differs from the 
main body of party opinion. 

The internationalists included, besides the 
socialist and syndicalist groups, certain radicals of 
the type of le Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, 
and M. Yves Guyot, who was the apostle of free 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 127 

trade. The Baron d'Estournelles, who had repre- 
sented France at the various Hague Conferences, 
founded, in 1903, the French parliamentary group 
for international arbitration, which included 
deputies of almost every shade of political opinion, 
from the moderate republicanism of M. Barthou to 
the socialism of Jaures. The internationalist party 
was divided into those who, like Jaures, the founder 
and editor of "I'Humanite," put la patrie first, and 
those who, like M. Gustav Herve, put la patrie 
nowhere. Again, we only refer to pre- War days, 
for the War has completely transmogrified M. 
Herve, converting him from an internationalist and 
pacifist, who suffered imprisonment for his anti- 
militarist opinions, into a patriot, almost as fiery 
as Deroulede. The newspaper he edits, once *'la 
Guerre Sociale," is now "la Victoire." ^ 

Some principles, while they divide members of 
the same party, may unite members of otherwise 
hostile groups. Thus we find that in one respect 
the French political organism describes a circle 
(again I refer only to ante- War days), for on its 
two extreme wings syndicalists and royalists joined 
hands to advocate recourse to violence in the pursuit 

^ Other French newspapers have changed their titles during 
the War, notably that which M. Clemenceau directed until he 
became Prime Minister. Originally "I'Aurore/' the paper be- 
came 'THomme Enchaine." It is now "I'Homme Libre/* 



128 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

of their widely divergent but equally revolutionary 
political aims. Not all syndicalists, not all royalists 
would have gone so far. But there is little doubt 
that many were prepared to do so. 

The syndicalists were divided into Syndicats 
Rouges^ approving of violence, and Syndicats 
Jaunes, who were content with constitutional 
methods. Some independent socialists, led by the 
most learned among them, Georges Sorel, author 
of Reflections sur la Violence, sided with the Syn- 
dicats Rouges. But Jaures condemned their atti- 
tude. At a famous trial, that of Bousquet-Levy, 
in June, 1907, Jaures advised the workingmen to 
employ legal methods alone. Car la violence, he 
added, est un signe de faihlesse passagere. Certain 
well-known syndicalists, notably M. Briand and M. 
Jules Guesde, who, in their early years, approved 
of violence, have since altered their opinions. It 
was in 1899 that M. Briand made the famous 
speech, which won for him the title of ''Father of 
the General Strike." "Enter the battle with the 
voting ticket, if you think well," he counselled the 
workers; "but," he added, "if you enter it with 
pikes, sabres, pistols, and guns, far from disapprov- 
ing of your action, I shall feel it my duty, should 
the necessity arise, to take my place in your ranks." 
Few ironies are more striking than that with which 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 129 

Briand's career presents us. Ten years after his 
invention of the General Strike, he, the sometime 
syndicahst, became Prime Minister of France, the 
responsible guardian of the social organisation 
which syndicalism proposes to destroy. During his 
term of office he had to deal with a strike, that of 
the postal employes, which if not general was at 
least the most formidable ever known. And Briand 
suppressed that strike by mobilising the workers 
themselves, a course of action which, in his syn- 
dicalist days, he had often said the bourgeoisie 
would never dare to adopt. 

The royalist gospel of violence counts for less 
than that of the syndicalists, because the royalists, 
despite rumours to the contrary, are a feeble folk. 
It is true that before the War many young univer- 
sity students in Paris thought it chic to pose as 
royalists, to boast of being camelots du rot, and of 
belonging to the royalist society V Action franfaise. 
In fashionable restaurants they liked to drink the 
health of King Philip VIII, as they called the Due 
d'Orleans. But I doubt whether their opinions 
were anything more than academic; and I wonder 
whether they would have raised a finger to with- 
draw him from his retirement in England. The 
other day, when I was making a purchase in a 
French shop in London, the French salesman. 



130 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

leaving his post behind the counter, mysteriously 
came round to my side, and much to my astonish- 
ment, whispered in my ear: *' Would you like to 
see the King of France? There he is," pointing to 
an elegant person wearing a typical French beard, 
but otherwise accoutred in the top note of fashion. 

An eye-witness describes in "F Action fran9aise," 
a pretty scene said to have been enacted in London 
on France's Day. On the threshold of Westmin- 
ster Cathedral, at the close of the Requiem INIass 
for French soldiers who fell on the field of battle, 
from the hand of a Zouave bearing the tricolour, le 
Due d'Orleans is said to have taken the national 
emblem and, kissing it, to have cried: "Let me, 
after thirty-two years of exile, embrace the colours 
of my country." 

"Dead and buried," was the verdict of a stalwart 
old French royalist, a friend of the late Comte de 
Paris, when I questioned him not long ago as to 
the future of the royalist movement in France. 
And I believe we should never hear of the royalists 
at all were they not led by that abusive journalist, 
le dement furieux, Leon Daudet, and by an author, 
Charles Maurras, who is no less a master of in- 
vective, though, when he keeps away from the field 
of political and religious controversy, he can 
write with restraint, dignity, and charm. These 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 131 

two, with the nominal editor, Henri Vaugeois, con- 
trol the royahst newspaper, "I'Action fran9aise," 
the organ not only of the society of that name, but, 
as it announces, of le nationalisme integral. In its 
columns before the War violent action was fre- 
quently advocated. "We must form energetic 
minorities,'' wrote Maurras, "the crowd always 
follows them. It is they w^ho make history. We 
must establish monarchy by force." ^ "We must 
create such a movement of public opinion as will be 
intense enough, when the day comes, to cause a 
great rising," cried Vaugeois. That was in 1900.^ 
And ever since, the day of that "great rising" has 
been growing more and more remote. It was never 
more remote than in the present hour. Never in 
the forty-eight years of its existence has the Third 
Republic been so firmly established as to-day. 
Whether it be the miracle of Joan of Arc or the 
involuntary miracle of les Bodies, France, through- 
out the War, has presented a united front to the 
enemy. Whatever her diversity of opinion in cer- 
tain directions, she stands now, as always, the 
bulwark of civilisation against barbarism. 

^ "L'Action fran9aise/' September 24^ 1913. 
^Ihid., September I 1900. 



CHAPTER X 

RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 

If it was a blunder to regard French energy 
and endurance in resisting the foe as betokening a 
new France, it would be no less a blunder to deny 
that certain ideals and tendencies now discernible in 
the French people point to a future unlike any 
other chapter in French history. 

"France is the country of re-awakenings and 
recommencements," wrote, as we have said, one of 
her living statesmen. And on the authority of a 
greater Frenchman we may add it is in periods of 
convulsion rather than of calm that those re-awak- 
enings occur. Une revolution de trois jours, cried 
Renan, fait plus pour le progres de V esprit humain 
qu'une generation de VAcademie des Inscriptions, 
In his Avenir de la Science this acute philosopher 
expresses the belief that toutes les grandes creations 
de la pensee sont apparues dans des situations 
trouhlees, "What an epoch was the sixteenth cen- 
tury!" he exclaims. "The cradle of the modern 
spirit! The century of Luther, Raphael, Michael 

132 



RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 133 

Angelo, Ariosto, Montaigne, Erasmus, Galileo, 
Copernicus ! ^ Yet that century was the century of 
perpetual conflict, religious, political, literary, 
scientific." Though we may find it difficult to point 
to the Raphaels, the Luthers, the Galileos of to-day, 
many are beginning to realise that in the birth of 
new ideas and new tendencies our present genera- 
tion may not be inferior to theirs. 

While in the political, economic, social, and 
international world of France to-day we may easily 
discover tendencies which point in no uncertain 
direction, in the religious world it is not easy even 
for the shrewdest prophet to predict the future. 

Few will deny that for twenty years before the 
War the intellectual classes in France were moving 
towards a Catholic revival.^ At first the War not 
immaterially accelerated and extended that move- 
ment. The emotions evoked by so great a national 
crisis found expression in religious fervour. 
Catholics lost no opportunity of pointing to the 
patriotism and valour displayed by the priests who 

^ Why does Kenan omit Shakespeare? Is he not entitled 
to rank side by side with these giants of art, literature, 
philosophy, and science? Does he not essentially belong to 
that sixteenth century in which he lived the greater part 
of his life? 

^ See ante, p. 27; and for a discussion of the causes and 
extent of this revival see "Introduction" to French Novelists 
of To-day, second series, by Winifred Stephens (John Lane). 



134 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

fought side by side with laymen in the trenches. 
*'See," they cried to their agnostic fellow-country- 
men, referring to the separation laws and those 
against the religious congregations, "how these 
ecclesiastics whom you persecuted forget their 
wrongs and lay down their lives for their country." 
But those who spoke thus were careful to forget 
that when it was first passed Catholics had bitterly 
resented the law of 1905, which had obliged priests 
and pastors to serve in the army. 

Nevertheless, far be it from us to question the 
patriotism of the French priesthood. It is recog- 
nised by all the Allied Governments, notably by our 
own. For the last two years our Government has 
been sending French ecclesiastics, among them at 
least two bishops and one archdeacon, to Ireland 
in order there to counteract the pro-German tend- 
encies of the native priesthood. 

That the Catholics should be eager to suck every 
advantage from this turn in the religious tide was 
perfectly natural. Not unnatural also was their 
tendency to exaggerate its extent. They were too 
prone to ascribe the wounded Poilus eagerness to 
attend mass to religious zeal rather than to the 
inevitable desire for a break in the dull routine of 
hospital life. To the same religious sentiment they 
attributed his wearing of religious medals and sym- 



RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 135 

bols, to which in reality he was often attached 
merely because they were the gifts of his women 
relatives and friends. 

Misinterpreting these signs, and confident that 
the nation was about to return to the bosom of the 
Church, French Catholics began to give themselves 
airs, to assume a pontifical manner, which, so I am 
told by an impartial observer, reacted against 
them. This, combined with what was believed to 
be the Pope's pro-German attitude, began, about 
the second year of the war, to impose a check on 
the Catholic Reaction. To-day, however, there are 
indications that an extremely well-organised propa- 
ganda may be producing a new Catholic revival. 

No matter of what shade of opinion, orthodox 
and heterodox alike,^ the one outcry of French 
Catholics is for unity. They deplore the bitterness 
of religious divisions. They demand la paix re- 
Ugieuse, But the peace they desire is a paw 
catholica; and I doubt whether such a peace be 
possible in France either to-day or to-morrow. 

This does not mean, however, that the much- 
vaunted union sacree is nothing but an empty term. 
Were it not something more than that the French 
would, as we have said, never have been able so 

^ See the ex- Abbe Loisy in Mors et Vita (Emile Nourry), 
p. 71. He mourns over the religious strife of the last years 
of the nineteenth century. 



136 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

persistently, so strenuously, so gallantly, to resist 
the most formidable foe they have ever had to face. 
It is true that their ardent patriotism, Veternel 
miracle frangais, le miracle de Jeanne d'Arc, has 
enabled them in this supreme hour to sink their 
diiFerences of opinion, to sink but not to forget 
them. M. Alfred Loisy strikes to the very heart 
of the matter when in Mors et Vita,^ he writes: 
On pent meme dire que, dans Vordre de la pensee, 
qui est une partie non negligedble de la vie humaine, 
tous les ponts sont coupes entre la societe contem- 
poraine et VEglise catholique. . . . Dans Vordre 
du sentiment et de V action, les communications ne 
sont pas interrompues. If this be true of the pres- 
ent, what of the future? Though orthodox Chris- 
tianity may be loosening its hold on the thought of 
France, it would seem that for a considerable time, 
perhaps for several generations, a strong current 
of sentiment may run in the direction of some form 
of Catholicism. We may refer again to M. Loisy, 
whom, let us remember, a papal decree has banished 
from the Church. He believes ^ that il faut aux 
dmes des foyers autres que ceux d'une science dont 
la lumiere ne rechauffe pas. And he holds that, 
"despite its antiquated doctrine, its overbearing 

"-Mors et Vita, p. 75. 
^Ibid., p. 125. 



RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 137 

hierarchy, and its frequently puerile mysticism, 
VEglise catholique en France est encore apparem- 
ment le mieux organisee de ces Foyers, celui qui 
donne encore a heaucoup d'entre nous, du moins a 
certains moments, la meilleure et la plus cliaude im- 
pression de VhumaniteJ" 

In these words M. Loisy no doubt speaks for a 
large number of Frenchmen, many of whom, 
though they have long ceased to be practising 
Catholics, though they would hesitate to subscribe 
to any Catholic dogma, have still, as a Frenchman 
put it to me, "their Catholic moments." But, on 
the other hand, there are many others — Protestants, 
who, though insignificant in number, play an im- 
portant part in the intellectual and political life of 
the nation, and the descendants of the old irrecon- 
cilable anti-clericals of the Voltaire or Gambetta 
type — whom tradition and sesntiment lead away 
from the Church. They can have no "Catholic 
moments," for their ancestors, in the case of the 
Protestants for centuries, in that of the anti-cleri- 
cals for generations, have been the bitter opponents 
of Catholicism. Some, like Anatole France, who 
had a Voltairean grandmother and Catholic par- 
ents, inherit both strains, clerical and anti-clerical. 

Consequently, while the intelligence of France 
rejects Catholic doctrine, the heart of an important, 



138 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

if not a large, part of the French nation no longer 
thrills with Catholic sentiment. And when in many- 
directions one observes the dying down of the old 
bitterness between clerical and anti-clerical, one 
inclines to believe that the stiffest battles for free- 
dom of thought have been already won. Conse- 
quently young radicals and socialists of to-day are 
less aggressively anti-clerical than their elders. In 
the French Parliament jokes at the expense of 
Christianity are less frequent than they were twen- 
ty years ago. Shortly before the War, when, 
during a parliamentary debate, JNI. Barres was 
urging the Government to preserve the religious 
fabrics of the country as national monuments, M. 
Beauquier, a free-thinker of the old-fashioned Vol- 
tairean type, indulged in a vulgar jest at the 
expense of the divinity, whereupon a more modern 
agnostic, M. Marcel Sembat, retorted: "If you 
were a monument, Beauquier, M. Barres would 
want to preserve you, you are so antique. Your 
ideas, let me assure you, have had their day." 

A more recent sign of the religious tolerance 
which is creeping over France may be found in a 
letter addressed in June, 1918,^ by M. Clemenceau 
(president du Conseil, or, as we should say, Prime 
Minister) , to the Cardinal Lu^on, Bishop of Lu9on, 

^See *THumanite;* June 28, 1918. 



RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 139 

in reply to his request that the Government would 
order official prayers in all the churches. The 
present Prime Minister of France was in earlier 
years one of the most virulent of anti-clericals, the 
friend of Gambetta, to whom is attributed the 
famous cry le cUricalisme voila Vennemi, and of 
Paul Bert, who used to describe Catholic influence 
as le phylloxera noir. Yet, under the reconciling 
influence of V union sacree M. Clemenceau, while 
pleading that the law prevents him from granting 
what the Cardinal asks, has so far forgotten his old 
hatred as to assure his correspondent that he appre- 
ciates the high motives which have inspired his 
request. ^'Especially/' he writes, "I entreat you to 
believe that the sympathy of the Government, as of 
all Frenchmen, is entirely with all those who, in 
whatsoever direction, wish in thought or in deed to 
contribute to the triumph of la patrie. It is in this 
direction that we shall realise that unanimity of 
heart to which we all aspire." 

M. Clemenceau's words probably represent the 
nearest approach to intellectual unity that the 
French nation is capable of achieving. Few advo- 
cates of free thought would wish it to go further. 
And they will agree with the Catholic, M. Victor 
Giraud, who, having remarked that diff^erences of 
belief cut more deeply in France than elsewhere. 



140 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

asks mais cela meme nfest il pas a Vhonneur du 
genie franfais? ^ Such diiFerences arise from the 
fact that the French are a serious nation. It is 
their frank facing of fundamental problems that 
arouses the old passions and prejudices which in 
other countries often exist unsuspected because they 
are undisturbed. 

So long as primitive emotions continue to be 
confronted with more philosophic views, so long 
will there be divergent opinions in France. It 
would be a bad sign for the country did that 
divergence disappear. Unity in that case would 
mean stagnation or retrogression. 

Very striking evidence of the new religious spirit 
now pervading France may be found in a lecture, 
le Fond Religieuoo de la Morale La'ique, delivered 
by M. Ferdinand Buisson, President of the League 
of the Rights of Man, to la Ligue de I'Enseigne- 
ment, on the 13th of March, 1917.' Here M. Buis- 
son pleads for something more than tolerance of 
adverse opinions. 

Nous demandons mieux que la tolerance: le 
respect pour la conviction d'autrui; plus encore, la 
sympathie pour ce quil y a de verite dans les ex- 
pressions imparfaites de la verite, 

^ La Troisieme France (Hachette), p. 26. 
^ Paris : Fischbacher. 



RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE 141 

"We may take," he continues, "all the con- 
flicting ideas and sentiments, aspirations and inter- 
ests which divide mankind, and we shall not find 
a single one in which all the good is on one side 
and all the evil on the other." 

The purely negative and critical position which 
in some minds might result from such a considera- 
tion is far from being that of this lecture. The duty 
of every free thinker, says M. Buisson, is to ex- 
amine his heart and see whether he has discovered 
a morality superior to that of the Gospel. And he 
concludes that, rejecting the supernatural and the 
biblical system of punishments and rewards, lay 
morality cannot do better than turn for inspiration 
to the Sermon on the Mount. 

Above all things must those to whom is entrusted 
the education of French youth beware of destroying 
one ideal without setting up another and a higher. 
For this reason, in secular schools, any irreverence 
on the part of the children towards the services and 
the church of their family should be discouraged. 

"Jeers and hostile criticism stick fast in the mind 
of the child. And one cannot be sure that he will 
replace the letter by the spirit, ritual by deeds, 
mechanical prayers by exaltation of soul, worship 
by duty." 

"Thus," continued the lecturer, "before I praise 



142 THE FRANCE I KNOAV 

a young man brought up in orthodoxy, who boasts 
that he believes in nothing, I should wish to be sure 
that at least he believes in his conscience and in 
duty ; for in truth had he lo^>t faith in those he would 
be more to be pitied than if he had retained all his 
superstitions." 

Such are the high moral ideals, such is the broad 
spirit of sympathy, animating the best secular 
teaching in France to-day. 

]M. Buisson is far from agreeing with certain 
agnostic teachers, with M. Maurras and M. Barres, 
for example, who, while rejecting Christianity for 
themselves, urge it upon other people. The highest 
ideals of lay morality, according to M. Buisson, 
should suffice for all classes of men. De toute evi- 
dence; la seule lot possible pour tons c^est celle de la 
sincerite absolue. 

In common with the great socialist leader, 
Edouard Vaillant, the President of the League of 
the Rights of Man, looks forward to the day when 
school-children shall be taught the various phases 
of man's mental and moral evolution, the various 
conquests achieved by man's mind from the Bronze 
Age to the Hebrew Prophets, from them to 
Pericles and Plato, and so on to Christianity and 
the development of modern ideas. Above all things, 
instead of being taught to despise the fetiches and 



RELIGIOUS OPINION IN JTIANCE 143 

superstitions of humanity's childhood, they should 
be encouraged to regard them as an endeavour on 
the part of the savage to explain the mysterious 
forces of the universe. 

One can only hope that the day may not be far 
distant when so elevating a programme of instruc- 
tion may be introduced into all our schools. 



CHAPTER XI 

A NEW FRANCE 

Les vrais chef-d'ceuvres sont nes dans les larmes; les insti- 
tutions puissantes ont ete forgees en des heures de crise. — 
Herriot, Agir., 134. 

In July, 1918, at the close of the annual congress 
of the Confederation Generale du Travail, the 
Secretary, M. Jouhaux, appealed to the workers of 
France to collaborate in that reconstitution of 
society which is being born in the sufferings of war 
(la reconstitution sociale qui s'enfante dans les 
douleurs de la guerre) } It is difficult for us in 
this country to realise how stupendous is the task 
that these words portend: "The reconstitution of 
society," by a nation the manhood of which, in 
numbers more vast than we can tell, has fallen on 
the battlefield: "The reconstitution of society," in 
a country whose ten richest departments paying 
before the War one-eleventh of the Republic's 
taxes, now through four years occupied by the 
enemy, lie in ruins, their very soil ploughed up by 
the shells of contending armies. The mere thought 

i"Le Petit Journal/' August 21, 1918. 
144 



A NEW FRANCE 145 

of a work so enormous might well paralyse the 
activities of any people less courageous than the 
French. But one of the greatest marvels in these 
days of wonder is the infinite energy of this nation. 
There never was a more absurd caricature than the 
German newspaper's description of Parisians as 
awaiting panic-stricken, during the spring offen- 
sive of 1918, the coming of the conquerer. Not 
only are our gallant Allies straining every sinew to 
liberate la patrie from the incubus of the German 
bully, but with their far-seeing imagination, fixing 
their gaze on the future, as well as on the present, 
they prepare for the blessed days of peace. Already 
they are laying the foundations of a new France 
— not in the reconquered territory alone, but 
throughout the land, in town and in country. So 
tremendous a rebuilding humanity has seldom, if 
ever, been called to undertake. It involves, be- 
sides the reconstruction of homes, villages, and 
towns destroyed by the enemy, the setting straight 
of many a disorder the War has at once revealed 
and aggravated. 

Countless were the schemes for national recon- 
struction I heard discussed in Paris drawing- 
rooms and round Paris dinner-tables while *'Big 
Bertha" was busy at work and the Great Offensive 
at its most desperate moment. Ranging through 



146 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

vast fields, administrative, economic, educational, 
and hygienic, they filled in the intervals of talk 
about the unity of command and the danger of the 
Germans entering Amiens. These varied projects 
can be but briefly noticed here. Any adequate 
account of them would require at least a whole 
volume. 

Some reforms long overdue, like the bitterly 
opposed income tax, instituted by the laws of 
December, 1916, and July, 1917, the War has 
already accomplished. Every Frenchman and every 
foreigner domiciled in France is now required to 
furnish a declaration of his income, and, if it be 
over 3000 francs, to pay a tax of 121/0 per cent. 
Those living in the army zone are necessarily ex- 
empted for the present. But they will be called 
upon for a declaration within three months of the 
cessation of hostilities. 

In the way of many other necessary improve- 
ments, the obstacles, even apart from the War, are 
neither few nor slight. The most serious arises from 
the over-centralisation of French government. All 
parties agree in demanding the reform of adminis- 
tration. The bureaucracy, that grand Napoleonic 
machine, of perfectly symmetrical design, in which 
the minutest wheels received their impulse from 
Paris, now that the personal rule on which it de- 



A NEW FRANCE 147 

pended is removed, grows sluggish and wasteful. 
"Initiative is discouraged; routine rules supreme; 
mediocrity is a condition of regular promotion, and 
favouritism is rife." ^ There is hardly a French 
writer on public aiFairs who does not deplore the 
inertia of government offices, especially lamentable 
in a country where the civil servant is supreme, 
where "he is determined to change nothing, though 
everything needs changing." ^ "What we need," 
writes a Frenchman, ''est un mecanisme adminis- 
tratif souple, adapte auw realites de notre epoque/' ^ 
Countless are the instances of industrial enterprises 
retarded or destroyed by official delays. Here is 
one of them: recorded in "le Journal Officiel" of 
the 21st of February, 1917, it occurred during one 
of the most serious industrial crises of the War, the 
coal famine in the winter of 1916-17, which arose 
from internal difficulties of transport complicated 
by a falling-off in the coal supply from Great 
Britain, owing to the commencement of the Ger- 
man submarine campaign. During the bitter cold 
of those winter months even the most expensive 
Paris hotels discontinued their central heating, 

^ A. L. Guerard, French Civilisation in the Nineteenth 
Century, p. 68. 

2 Pierre Mille, "The Observer," July 14, IQIS. 

^ Biard d'Aunet, la Politique et les Affaires (Payot, 1918), 
p. 23. 



148 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

while in the humbler walks of life people were 
suffering terrible hardships. It seems almost in- 
credible, therefore, that during that very time a 
French coal merchant should have been vainly ap- 
pealing for permission to erect a steam crane to 
discharge on to the quay at Honfleur such cargoes 
of fuel as he was able to obtain. Yet so it was ; and 
through nine interminable months he was com- 
pelled to carry his request to no less than eight pub- 
lic authorities one after the other, ranging from 
the Honfleur Chamber of Commerce to the Presi- 
dent of the Republic. And by the time he received 
the necessary authorisation the worst of the crisis 
was past. 

This incident alone would suffice to prove the 
crying necessity for some measure of decentralisa- 
tion if France is to develop her natural wealth and 
derive full advantage from the industry, the thrift, 
and the ability of her people. 

In one direction a beginning has already been 
made. It is the outcome of a tendency visible in 
France before the War and affecting not only 
economics, industry, and commerce, but also liter- 
ature and art. I refer to the movement known as 
"Regionalism." It branches far and wide. With 
its literary aspect, represented by the work of 
Maurice Barres for Lorraine, of Le Goffic and 



A NEW FRANCE 149 

Anatole le Braz for Brittany, of Mistral for Lan- 
guedoc, we are not concerned here. But we shall 
attempt briefly to indicate some of the effects of 
regionalism on economic, industrial, and education- 
al reform. The tendency, discernible as we know 
not only in France, but also in Spain, England, 
Ireland and elsewhere, is towards the equality or 
self-dependence of regions, but without any sug- 
gestion of separatism. One might describe region- 
alism as the principle of self-determination applied 
to local government. In France, regionalism is 
represented by four distinct schools,^ two of which, 
as they are purely philosophical and aesthetic, we 
may pass over. The remaining two are la Ligue 
d' Action franfaise, with M. Charles Maurras as its 
moving spirit, and la Ligue de Representation Pro- 
fessionelle, presided over by the Deputy M. Jean 
Henessy. 

U Action franfoise we have already considered 
as a royalist organisation.^ From that point of 
view it is comparatively unimportant. Much more 
significant is its regionalist tendency, as represent- 
ed, for example, in an interesting book, VEtang de 

^ See The New French Regionalism, article by Huntley 
Carter in the "Contemporary Review/' July, 1918. 
^ See ante, p. 129. 



150 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Berre^ by M. Charles Maurras. The volume de- 
rives its title from an Arlesian proverb, Avangons 
tou jours et nous verrons Berre, Berre is a Proven- 
cal village. UEtang de Berre has much the same 
significance as Lord Rosebery's parish pump. In 
the book which bears this title we find the objects 
of the regionalists clearly stated by one of them- 
selves — 

"Before everything we demand the liberty of our 
Communes. We desire them to control their own 
officials and to regulate their work. We protest 
against their being mere administrative districts. 
We want them to live their individual lives, to have 
a personality of their own, to become, so to speak, 
the mothers of their sons, inspiring them with the 
virtues and passions of their race. 

"That our Communes should be united by chance, 
according to the mere whim of some soldier or offi- 
cial, we consider lamentable. Their relations should 
be determined by affinities, historical, economic, na- 
tional and — if rightly regarded — eternal. 

"Let us speak frankly. We would liberate from 
their departmental cages the souls of those prov- 
inces, whose glorious names we, Gascons, Auverg- 
nats, Limousins, Bearnais, Dauphinois, Roussillon- 

^ Paris: Edouard Champion, 1915. Sold for the benefit of 
the wounded of the XVth Corps. 



A NEW FRANCE 151 

ais, Proven9aux, Languedociens, are so proud to 
bear. . . . We are autonomists, we are federalists; 
and if anywhere in northern France there are those 
who desire to join us, to them we hold out our hands. 
Recently a group of Breton peasants demanded for 
their illustrious province the re-establishment of the 
ancient estates. We are with those Bretons, Yes. 
we desire an assembly . . . (merely for local pur- 
poses not entrenching on the central authority) at 
Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, also at Mar- 
seilles, or at Aix. These assemblies should regu- 
late our administration, our public works, our coun- 
try courts, schools, and universities. If it be 
objected that a nation can never retrace its steps, 
we reply: 'That is true. But our intention is not 
to copy the past, but rather to complete and de- 
velop it.' 

". . . For, after all, it is the national interest that 
inspires us. We believe that the realisation of our 
ideas would result in the intellectual and moral 
renaissance of the south. But we desire something 
more: the complete development of the wealth of 
our soil. Provincialism alone can carry through 
the great enterprises contemplated for centuries, 
but never executed : such, for example, as the canal 
through Gascony and Languedoc uniting the At- 
lantic with the Mediterranean, the canal from the 



152 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Rhone to Marseilles, through Provence and Dau- 
phine. . . . And who knows ! perhaps the economic 
disputes now rending France might then be settled 
for the good of each and of all." 

It is precisely the settlement of those economic 
disputes by new provincial or regional assemblies, 
designed to replace the present departmental Con- 
seils Generaux, that is the object of the other re- 
gional school, which is directed by M. Henessy. It 
counts among its adherents members of all political 
parties, from the syndicalists to moderate or con- 
servative republicans. The regional representatives 
in these assemblies are to be ranged in six categories 
according to occupation: agriculturists, manufac- 
turers, merchants, and members of the three liberal 
professions. M. Henessy submitted his proposal to 
the Chamber in 1913. It proceeded no further than 
discussion. But since the War, in October, 1915, 
the Government has adopted it in a modified form. 
And throughout France there now exist regional 
economic councils designed to promote the economic 
interests and to develop the economic resources of 
each particular region. It is possible that these 
councils may form the nucleus for a new and more 
elastic administrative system, in which "the labour 
union, rather than the city, would be the social 



A NEW FRANCE 153 

unit" and "the political hierarchy would be replaced 
by economic federalism." 

In certain districts, notably in Lorraine, the work 
of these councils is ably seconded by regional banks, 
which make a point of encouraging and supporting 
local enterprise. These banks, however, have not 
been general enough to correct two disastrous na- 
tional tendencies. One is a spirit of excessive cau- 
tion which leads to hoarding ; the other, the opposite 
extreme, the glamour of the unknown, which leads 
to rash speculation. 

So far has the spirit of caution gone in France, 
that I know of large landed proprietors who, mis- 
trustful of banks, refuse to renounce the traditional 
stocking. One of these considers her diffidence well 
justified by the diflSculty many of her friends ex- 
perienced in obtaining money from their banks on 
the outbreak of hostilities. We in England are 
accustomed to regard this financial timidity as in- 
herent in the French race. We ascribe it to their 
vivid imagination conjuring up before them all 
manner of terrors that never occur to our duller 
Anglo-Saxon minds, which require to run bolt up 
against a calamity before they can realise it. French 
writers, however, incline to regard this economy, 
amounting frequently to parsimony, as having be- 
come more pronounced of late, especially since 



154 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Guizot's famous admonition Enrichissezvotis, It 
was then, writes a Frenchman, that cette tendance 
hourgeoise a commence a se constituer en dogme so- 
cial et politique.^ How blighting an influence such 
a tendency exercised on commercial and industrial 
enterprise will readily be imagined. 

At the opposite extreme was another type of 
Frenchman. He, far from wishing to hoard, united 
to his cupidity a passion for adventure. Scorning 
to lay up his talent in a napkin, he risked his capital 
abroad. France thus became the world's banker, 
lending enormous sums, not only to Russia, Bul- 
garia, Greece, and Turkey, but to Austria and 
Germany. "It is horrible to think," wrote a con- 
tributor to "r Action fran9aise" on the 31st of July, 
1911, "that in case of war, those very shells which 
slaughter our sons will have been paid for with 
French money." ^ 

Meanwhile French commercial and industrial 
enterprises languished for lack of this talent which 
was being invested abroad. There are signs, how- 
ever, that the War is already bringing the nation 

^ See la Devoir de V Argent, by Novus. No. 7, "le Fait 
de la Semaine" series. Paris: Bernard Grasset. November 
24, 1917. 

^ This subj ect has been ably dealt with by numerous French 
writers. To mention three only: Novus, op. cit.; Biard d' 
Aunet, op. cit., p. IS passim; Andre Cheradame, la Crise 
frangaise (Plon Nourrit, 1912), pp. 547 et seq. 



A NEW FRANCE 155 

into a middle course between parsimony on the one 
hand and rash speculation on the other. For the 
War is teaching us all the intimate relation and 
interdependence of personal and public affairs. It 
is bringing home to us the obligations of capital. 
In successive war-loans it is offering every citizen 
an investment which is at once patriotic and per- 
sonally advantageous, which in the words of M. 
Albert Thomas," realises the ideal of a financial 
enterprise for the general good which shall also ben- 
efit private savings: Des combinaisons financier es 
qui permettraient tout a la fois de realiser Vceuvre 
collective et de remunerer Vepargne particuliere. 

The forty-four and a half milliards of francs 
subscribed in the two first war-loans prove that the 
French are beginning to recognise this community 
of personal and public interest. 

Education of the right sort may help to demon- 
strate this important truth. There are few coun- 
tries where education is so well appreciated as in 
France, where the mass of the townsfolk are so 
cultured, or possess so wide a knowledge of their 
own history and so profound a respect for correct 
language. How far culture has permeated the 
whole urban, and especially Parisian, population 
may be illustrated by an incident of my own child- 

^ Quoted by Novus, op. cit., 24. 



156 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

hood: a friend who was to take me to le Theatre 
fran9ais was prevented from coming at the last 
moment; she sent as my chaperon her femme de 
menage, a worthy person who had never received 
anything but an elementary school education and 
who had never before set foot in the national theatre. 
I expected her to be bored. But no, she sat en- 
thralled through that somewhat heavy tragedy of 
les Burgraves, and at the end astonished me by 
exclaiming: "What a pleasure it is, Mademoiselle, 
to hear one's language so well pronounced." I 
doubt whether such an incident could have occurred 
in any country but France, and even in France 
outside Paris. 

In the country it is different. There education 
lags far behind that in the towns, despite the ad- 
mirable efforts of the village schoolmaster, who is 
generally a fine type of citizen. A Frenchwoman 
of my acquaintance was recently appalled to find 
village children on the 14th of July who were 
totally ignorant of what the national festival cele- 
brated. Many thoughtful Frenchmen now demand 
that the whole of the national education should be 
recast from top to bottom : first, that professors and 
teachers should be better paid. Their salaries in 
England are poor enough, but not so inadequate 
as in France, where the average salary of a univei'- 



A NEW FRANCE 157 

sity professor is £200 a year. Secondly, they de- 
mand the setting up of a complete educational 
ladder, enabling the poorest child, if suitably en- 
dowed, to share with the richest every educational 
advantage. Finally, many think that the aims and 
principles of education are wrong, that while cul- 
tivating the memory it neglects to foster the faculty 
of observation. "We are too much dominated by le 
scribe accroupi/^ writes a statesman, who was for- 
merly a professor of Greek. ^ "Do you believe," he 
asks, "in clogging a child's mind with all the ad- 
ventures of the Pepins and all the deeds of Louis 
le Debonnaire? Would it not be more useful for 
him to know the clauses of the Treaty of Frank- 
fort? Were it not better to give him some knowl- 
edge of space rather than of time, for the latter can 
only be effectually learnt from experience? Our 
baccalaureat (examination corresponding roughly 
to the Oxford or Cambridge Senior) has filled 
France with ignorant encyclopaedias, good for any- 
thing, i. e. good for nothing." 

Though educational reforms would help to re- 
move some of the evils from which French country 
life is suffering they need to be accompanied by 
agrarian, hygienic, and moral changes. How little 
France, the most completely agricultural country 

^ M. Edouard Herriot, ex-Minister, Agir., pp. 30 et seq. 



158 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

of western Europe, has done for her rural districts 
comes home to those who strike away from tourists' 
beaten paths, away from the trim farms of the 
north, the cider orchards of Normandy, the rich 
vineyards of Touraine, into the tumble-down ham- 
lets, the untidy peasant holdings, and the depopu- 
lated villages of the south and of the eastern 
marches. Here we realise the aptness of the title, 
The Dying Countryside {la terre qui meurt) , which 
M. Bazin has given to one of his novels. 

No doubt one of the main causes of this depres- 
sion is to be found in the land system. Most re- 
formers agree that agrarian changes are imperative 
if la patrie is to resist the severe economic strain 
which will be put upon her for many years after 
the War. Old Quesnai's motto pauvre paysan, 
pauvre royaume is as true of the Third Republic 
as it was of Louis XI V's kingdom ; for nearly two- 
thirds of the thirty-nine millions of the present 
population live in the country. And it was a French 
philosopher, Le Play, who demonstrated the na- 
tion's dependence on the corn-sack, which the 
peasant brings to market with such pathetic regu- 
larity.^ There is no better proof that the fresh 
breeze of a new life is blowing over the fields of 

^ For an exposition of Le Play's social theories and their 
application to present conditions, see The Coming Polity by 
P. Geddes and V. Branford (Williams & Norgate, 1917). 




M. Rene Bazin 



A NEW FRANCE 159 

France than the seven bills proposing agrarian re- 
form now before the French Chamber. 

We in this country have been accustomed to see 
the small peasant holding of France held up to us 
as a model. But even models may degenerate, and 
the most excellent systems may be abused if carried 
too far. This has happened in France. The 
division of heritages, according to clauses 826 and 
832 of the Code Napoleon, has resulted in an infinite 
distribution {morcellement et parcellement) of the 
land, until certain holdings to employ a current 
hyperbole are no broader than a scythe (nont plus 
que la largeur de la faucille) . Moreover these tiny 
heritages are frequently dispersed in different parts 
of the commune, rendering impossible that motor 
cultivation and motor traction which are now the 
first necessities of successful farming. That the 
French Government recognises this is proved by a 
provision of September, 1915, permitting the for- 
mation of state-aided Syndicats de culture mecan- 
ique. Already many years ago, when the evil was 
not so pronounced as it is to-day, Balzac saw the 
danger. For into the mouth of his Cure de Village 
he puts these words: "The whole evil resides in the 
system of inheritance prescribed by the Civil Code 
. . . that is the mortar v.hich, perpetually pounding 
up the land, . . . will end by killing France." It 



160 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

is this system which in France accentuates the tend- 
ency more or less present in all civilised states, for 
the population to desert the country and to congre- 
gate in towns; it is this system which is partly 
accountable for the limitation of French families. 

But how is the evil to be remedied? "Life is so 
healthful," writes Carlyle, "that it even finds 
nourishment in death." Thus out of the death of 
northern France, out of its invasion and devasta- 
tion, out of the obhteration by the enemy of old 
barriers and landmarks, there bids fair to arise a 
redistribution of land which, extended to the whole 
country, may result in a rebirth of the countryside. 
Not unknown in other European countries, and in 
France itself in earlier epochs, has been a general 
pooling of the land in the district, a temporary 
holding in common, affected at the request of the 
inliabitants of certain neighbourhoods and followed 
by a redistribution. This is the kind of measure 
now contemplated in France. Into all the details 
of the various proposals now before the French 
Parhament I cannot enter here. They may be 
found in a pamphlet, "le Statut de la Terre et du 
Parlement," ^ by a French deputy, Member of the 
Conseil Superieur de T Agriculture, M. Bouilloux 
Lafont. 

^ Paris: Bernard Grasset. "Le Fait de la Semaine" series. 



A NEW FRANCE 161 

Among the many evils this War is revealing is 
the extent to which tuberculosis and alcoholism are 
ravaging the population. 

Before the War, though the victims of tubercu- 
losis alone were one hundred thousand a year, to 
speak against these scourges was to cry in the 
desert. Throughout the nineteenth century, while 
the toll of war amounted to two millions, that of 
tuberculosis was ten millions. Yet it is only now 
that something really effectual is being done to 
check the progress of this terrible disease. The law 
has taken the tuberculous under its protection. The 
government is erecting in every department gen- 
eral sanatoria and agricultural colonies specially 
destined for tuberculous soldiers. Also, in the 
state dispensaries now being established precautions 
against this and another yet more serious disease 
are now being taught. 

That the government has done so little to check 
the progress of one of the chief causes of tubercu- 
losis, alcoholism, is occasioning serious discontent in 
France. True, absinthe has been prohibited. But 
other measures are urgently needed. 

Certain reformers demand prohibition. "Under 
the increasing pressure of all healthy opinion, will 
not some decisive measure be taken?" asks M. 



162 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Victor Giraud.^ "Will not a courageous minister 
save the country by decreeing prohibition?" "We 
are spending annually one milliard four hundred 
millions of francs on alcohol," said M. Herriot, ad- 
dressing rUniversite des Annales.^ "Impose your 
will, good people, and insist during the next election 
on the suppression of this scourge, of this disgrace. 
The future of France depends on it." 

Closely associated with the problem of alcoholism 
is that other problem of depopulation. It should 
not be exaggerated. To hear some people talk one 
might think that the population of France was di- 
minishing. That is not the case. With the one 
exception of 1872, after the Franco-Prussian War, 
every census, since the first in 1801, has shown an 
increase.^ The cause for anxiety lies in the fact 
that the rate of increase has been declining and that 
it has not kept pace with the increase of neighbour- 
ing nations, with that of Germany especially. In 
1871 the population of France was thirty-six mil- 
lions, that of Germany forty-one. In 1910, in 
France it was thirty-nine millions, in Germany 
sixty-five. "How many political events — and first 
and foremost the present War — does not this ex- 

'^La Troisieme France (Hachette, 1917), p. 220. 

2 In April, 1916. See Agir., p. 28. 

^ Levasseur, Questions Ouvrieres (1907)> p. 208. 



A NEW FRANCE 163 

plain," cries one French social reformer;^ while 
another prophesies that the soldiers who return from 
the trenches will tell us that the War would have 
been averted had the inhabitants of France been 
increasing in numbers as rapidly as those of Ger- 
many.^ But there is another point of view, viz.: 
that a rapidly increasing population is one of the 
main causes of war. A far-seeing contributor to 
"The Nineteenth Century," writing in January, 
1910, asked: "Is Germany keenly desirous of an- 
nexing new lands? Of course she is. How could 
she be otherwise with a population of seventy 
millions, which in time to come will be nigh on one 
hundred millions, confined within narrow limits? 
Germany must find an outlet for her people." 

To the rapid growth of the German population 
are largely due the horrors from which the world is 
suffering to-day. "Progress, roughly speaking," ^ 
writes Havelock Ellis, "has proved incompatible 
with high fertility." For the French realise that 
as civilisation advances, as science develops, quality 
becomes more important than quantity, one man's 
brains more effectual than hundreds of hands. To 
see one of the effects of the adoption of this idea 
by the French working-classes you have only to 

^ M. Herriot, Agir., p. 26. 

^ Giraud, la Troisieme France, p. 21 6. 

^Essays in War-Time (1916), pp. 68-9- 



164 THE FRANCE I KNOAY 

compare the absence of squalor in the poorest part 
of Paris with the condition of our London slums. 
In France the loudest outcry for a large increase 
of population proceeds from the least progressive 
section of the community: from the Catholics/ 

The main argument in favour of an increase of 
the population of any country is military. If the 
barbaric institution of war is to continue, then it is 
to the interest of every nation to produce as much 
fodder for cannon as possible. But if at the close 
of the present War humanity has not progressed 
beyond this stage, then it is useless to talk about "a 
new France" or a new anything. The old order 
will persist with all the old evils. 

Happily for the world the most enlightened 
French statesmen, among whom are M. Gabriel 
Hanotaux and M. Albert Thomas, and two ex- 
Prime Ministers, M. Ribot, M. Leon Bourgeois,^ 
realise keenly that we are now at the turning-point 
of the world's history; that this War is presenting 
us with a unique opportunity for inaugurating a 
new international order, a Society of Nations, which 
may save from utter destruction all that is worth 
saving in mankind. 

^ See the articles on depopulation contributed by M. Rene 
Bazin to the "Echo de Paris" during the war. 

^ Author of one of the first modern French books advocat- 
ing a League of Nations: Pour le Societe des Nations (IQIO). 



A NEW FRANCE 1G5 

M. Ribot was the first French Prime Minister 
to declare officially in 1917 in favour of a League 
of Nations. On the 5th of June the Chambre des 
Deputes unanimously supported him. And, on 
the 22nd of July, a commission was appointed un- 
der the presidency of M. Leon Bourgeois to con- 
sider the conditions under which a Society of Na- 
tions may be established. The committee has now 
completed its report and submitted it to M. 
Clemenceau. As I write its discussion in the 
Chamber is eagerly awaited. 

Meanwhile French politicians of all parties 
strongly advocate the immediate formation of a 
solid league between the twenty-four nations now 
allied against the Central Powers. Such an associ- 
ation, if both economic and diplomatic, would, in 
their opinion, serve as an excellent foundation for 
a Society of Nations.^ A beginning has already 
been made in the various economic conferences be- 
tween the Allied Powers, the first of which was 
held at Paris, in 1916. But these conferences are 
not enough. It is even more important that the 
various Allied Governments should confer together 
on matters of foreign policy. If it be objected that 

^ See "le Petit Parisien/' July 13, 1918, for the views on 
this matter of M. Doumergue, former Prime Minister, M. 
Bienvenu-Martin, ex-Minister of Justice, and M. Marcel 
Cachin, Deputy. 



166 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

certain diiFerences might result from such a confer- 
ence, is that not another reason for holding it? If 
these differences exist to-day, will they not also 
present themselves at the Peace Congress? Would 
it not be wiser for the Allies to attempt to reconcile 
them now than to appear before the Central 
Empires at the Peace Congress divided among 
themselves, and incapable of forming even a nucleus 
of a Society of Nations ? In such a case there would 
be no hope of a new France, and, in the words of a 
French deputy, cen serait fait de Vhumanite, du 
progres et de la civilisation ("it would be all over 
with humanity, progress and civilisation"). 

"For," argued M. Ferdinand Buisson,^ in a 
speech delivered in August, 1918, to the Executive 
Committee of the radical and radical-socialist party, 
"the establishment of a Society of Nations is no 
longer one of the solutions of the problem, it has 
become the only possible solution. If the formida- 
ble duel between the allied democracies and the 
Central Empires is not to end by destroying the 
liberty of the people — that is to say, civilisation — 
two conditions must be realised : 

"First, Germany must fail in her attempt to 
dominate by force of arms. 

^ President of the League of the Rights of Man and Presi- 
dent d'Honneur of the Executive Committee of the Radical 
and Radical-Socialist party. 



A NEW FRANCE 167 

"Second, she must be rendered incapable of mak- 
ing another attempt. 

"The first condition is in course of being realised. 
. . . Before long the world will see the final failure 
of the greatest coup de force it has ever witnessed. 

"But when this victory has been won it will be 
necessary to gain yet another . . . the definite 
abandonment of recourse to arms as a means of 
settling international disputes." 

In this glorious autumn of 1918, as day by day 
the news comes of the magnificent victories won by 
our heroic warriors on the western front, from some 
of the most thoughtful among the French people 
the cry goes up: Why this delay in creating the 
machinery of a society of nations ? That alone can 
realise the ideal for which our valiant defenders are 
laying down their lives. "To bless them, to admire 
them is not enough. They must know, they must 
feel, they must understand that their efforts will 
not be in vain, that liberty and peace are assured for 
their younger brethren." 

On the eve of the reassembling of the French 
Parhament, in an article contributed to "I'Human- 
ite," ^ M. Marcel Cachin, the Socialist leader, de- 
manded that the Chamber of Deputies should con- 
sider without delay the Government commission's 

^August 28, 1918. 



168 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

report, especially that i^art of it said to deal with 
the employment of an economic weapon in case 
Germany should refuse to abandon her regime of 
militarism and violence. 

Some measure of encouragement has been given 
to these nobly impatient reformers by an authorised 
report^ that in conversation with M. Leon Bour- 
geois, the Prime Minister of France has declared in 
favour of a society of nations. 

M. Bourgeois had reproached M. Clemenceau 
with the ironic terms in which he had referred to 
the movement. "You must not take too literally 
words to which I never attached the importance 
apparently attributed to them by others," was the 
Prime Minister's reply. "If you regard me as 
opposed to a society of nations, you commit a very 
grave error." 

Then, taking a paper from his desk, he handed 
it to M. Bourgeois. "Here," he said, "are the 
resolutions passed at a recent conference of the 
Allies. Read the last lines. After that phrase: 'to 
put an end to violence,' you will observe these few 
words written in my own hand, and added at my 
special request: et pour introduire dans le monde 
le regime du droit organise. The regime of or- 
ganised law in the world is the society of nations." 
^ See 'TEvenement/' August 26, 1918. 



CHAPTER XII 

woman's position in FRANCE 

The comparative position of the married woman 
in America, France, and Germany has been briefly 
summed up by the current saying : In America the 
wife walks in front of her husband, in France at 
his side, in Germany behind him. The married 
woman's position in England is evidently too com- 
plex for definition by so concise a formula. But in 
France, as we shall see, there are many who would 
dissent from so sweeping a generalisation. 

Legalement mineure, socialement majeure. Thus 
does Victor Hugo tersely, and not inaccurately, 
describe his fellow-countrywoman's position. In 
other words, socially the Frenchwoman is man's 
equal, legally she is his ward. 

To a superficial observer of French family life 
the wife ^ may in all things appear her husband's 
equal. In domestic affairs they run in double har- 
ness to an extent unknown in this country. Have 

^ Of the unmarried Frenchwoman we shall have something 
to say in our last chapter. 

169 



170 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

you ever, at some lower middle-class French resort, 
watched both parents busy on the sands fussing over 
their children's bath or paddle, father as well as 
mother taking off tiny shoes and tucking up little 
skirts, when the average British father would at 
such a moment carefully avoid his family circle? 

There is no country in the world where family 
life is more intense than in France or where mother- 
hood is more beautiful. Owing partly to the insti- 
tution of marriages of convenience, it is in mater- 
nity that the average Frenchwoman expresses all 
the passion of her nature. 

Alexandre Dumas (fils), when with no delicate 
pen he is about to expose the weaknesses and fail- 
ings of women, announces that woman as mother 
is to be excepted from his criticism. He will regard 
woman as merely wife or courtesan. Woman as 
mother is too sacred for dissection. 

La Mere, he writes, est la seule maniere d'etre 
de la Femme que Vamour de VHomme ne puisse 
reconstituer, une fois quelle n'est plus; Vhomme 
remplace Vepouse, Vamante, la soeur, la fille, il ne 
remplace jamais la mere. II y a entre la mere et 
r enfant une complicite d'organes et de chair, une 
vie Vun dans V autre qui forgent un lien que rien ne 
pent plus rompre, meme la mort. . . . La mere n'a 



woman's position in FRANCE 171 

pas de sexe dans la pensee de VHomme; elle y est 
d'ordre divin, 

Aussi reservov^-nous une fois pour toutes, dans 
cette etude de la Femme, cet argument de la Mere 
par lequel on a coutume d'arreter toute discussion 
sur ce sujet de discussions eternelles. Nous nou^ 
agenouillons devant la Mere, mais nous ne tombons 
pas pour fa aux pieds de la Femme? 

The closeness of the tie between mother and 
children is doubtless largely responsible for the re- 
luctance with which Frenchmen emigrate. For 
one part of a family to leave its nest and move, even 
from the left to the right bank of the Seine, causes 
far more heartrending and shedding of tears than 
for an English son to leave his parents and go to 
the opposite end of the world. I know middle-aged 
married men in France who are unhappy if they 
pass a single day without going to see their mother. 
Only their passionate patriotism has enabled 
French mothers to endure the agony of parting 
with their sons during the War. 

The French mother is a queen in her home : the 
older she grows the more she is reverenced. Her 
children and grandchildren, and often great-grand- 
children, adore her, and her old age, surrounded 

^Preface to VAmi des Femmes (1869). See Alexandre 
Dumas {fils), Theatre complet. Vol. IV, p. 5. 



172 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

by her offspring, is very beautiful. The French 
mother possesses that rare gift of retaining all her 
parental authority and yet never ceasing to be a 
comrade and a confidante. 

Almost equally is the Frenchwoman a queen in 
society. George Meredith, writing ^ of the Ger- 
mans, whom he describes as "a growing people" 
and "conversable as well," foretells that "when their 
men, as in France . . . consent to talk on equal 
terms with their women, and to listen to them, their 
growth will be accelerated and shapelier." 

Frenchmen have been talking and listening to 
their women for centuries. Hence France is the 
only country in the world which has produced any- 
thing worthy to be called "polite society." For, to 
quote Meredith again, where women are kept in 
the background, or, as he puts it, "where the veil 
is over women's faces, you cannot have society, 
without which the senses are barbarous and the 
comic spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness 
to slake its thirst." 

A foreigner who mixes with French people is 
struck by the absence of hard and fast barriers be- 
tween the sexes. It is perhaps the feminine note 
that dominates. And Michelet may not have been 
far wrong when he wrote : la France est femme. At 

^ An Essay on Comedy. 



woman's position in FRANCE 17B 

any rate, men and women talk about the same 
things, are interested in the same things. At a 
dinner-party, they do not invariably separate when 
the meal is done — some men may go to the smoking- 
room, but the majority follow their hostess to the 
salon. The separation in England for what the 
French visitor to this country describes as that 
curious ceremony, the pass wine, has always struck 
him as odd. The reason why men's clubs are so 
often failures in France is that Frenchmen do not 
habitually seek one another's society. The most 
successful French club is the Paris Ranelagh, the 
Racing Club of France ; and it partly owes its suc- 
cess to the fact that a large proportion of its fifteen 
hundred members are women. 

Every Frenchwoman is a potential salonniere. 
She knows how to set men talking; and in some 
measure she invariably knows how to practise 
Mme. Recamier's art of "listening with seduction." 
For the part of inspiratrice she is without a rival 
all the world over. 

In the sphere of business no less than in family 
and social life, the Frenchwoman is man's comrade. 
In affairs, she long ago established her reputation 
for shrewdness, energy, and method. In 1907 it was 
calculated that nine out of every ten prosperous 
little businesses in France owed their success to 



174 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

woman's co-operation.^ English tourists have al- 
ways been struck by the leading part Madame plays 
in small restaurants and shops, where she sits at the 
cash desk taking the money and directing every- 
thing, while her husband's function, as he flits about 
making himself agreeable to customers, appears to 
be chiefly ornamental. 

But in large as well as in small business houses, 
la Grande Samaritaine and la Maison Paquin, for 
example, a woman is often found directing side by 
side with a man. That Mme. Paquin is the most 
successful business woman in the world was proba- 
bly recognised by the French Government when it 
created her un chevalier de la legion d'Jionneur. 

Such being the domestic, social, and business 

position of the Frenchwoman, what is her legal 

standing? How does the Code Napoleon, or that 

part of it known as le code civil, treat woman? 

Better, replies Michelet,^ than any other code in the 

world (la loi la favorise plus qu'aucune femme 

d' Europe) . But then we must consider what was 

Michelet's view of woman's role and destiny. Elle 

ne fait son salut, he writes, qu'en faisant le honheur 

de Vhomme,^ So Michelet agrees with the Book of 

^ See le Feminisme frangais, by Charles Turgeon (1907), 
Vol. II, p. 167. 

^La Femme (I860), p. 157. 
3 Ihid., p. 48. 



woman's position in FRANCE 175 

Genesis, and with its interpreter Bossuet, who, 
declaring woman to have originated in man's super- 
fluous bone,^ maintained that she was only evoked 
as his "aid" and "complement." This admirer of 
the Code Napoleon as it affects women would not 
probably have disagreed with its framer or inspirer 
when he asserted that woman is as much the absolute 
property of some man as the gooseberry bush is the 
property of the gardener. 

For those who, like Augustus Bebel, take a dif- 
ferent view of woman's position, for those who are 
capable of regarding her as a human being inde- 
pendent of the functions of wife and mother, many 
of the Code's enactments seem to degrade her into 
nothing more than the merest chattel. The late 
fimile Faguet, a member of the French Academy, 
throughout his book le Feminisme deplores the 
subordinate position in which the Code places 
women. He considers it injurious to the whole of 
French society. Another academician, M. Etienne 
Lamy, suggests that Napoleon endeavoured to 
compensate men for the loss of their political liber- 
ties by making them tyrants in their own homes.^ 

At best, the Code's attitude towards women is 

^ Cf. Sir Thomas Browne, who describes woman as "the 
rib, the crooked piece of man." 

^ La Femme de Demain (1907), p. l68. 



176 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

patronising, paternal, protective. In one clause, that 
requiring a father to bequeath a certain portion 
of his estate in equal shares to his children of both 
sexes, it would seem to favour woman's independ- 
ence, did it not in another clause deprive her of any 
power to control the property thus inherited. So 
utterly irresponsible did it regard her that, not 
content with depriving her of the right to act as 
guardian to her own children, it even refused to 
recognise her as a witness to any legal document^ 
it denied her right to open legal proceedings with- 
out her husband's consent, it compelled her to live 
under the same roof as her husband, it deprived her 
of the control of her own earnings. 

There are those in this country who regard the 
French dowry system as encouraging woman's 
independence, and who would like to see it intro- 
duced into our own land. 

From certain points of view it may enhance her 
prestige, but it hardly conduces to her independ- 
ence, because, as long as her husband lives, though 
her capital is nominally her own, le systeme dotal 
denies her the right to dispose of it. If her husband 
were in financial straits she could not lend it to him 
or even raise a mortgage on it for his benefit. 

The root idea of all the Code's enactments con- 
cerning women is that every female is incapable 



woman's position in FRANCE 177 

of managing her own affairs, at any rate as long as 
her husband lives. After his death she may obtain 
almost absolute control of her dowry. But it was 
only through widowhood (divorce was illegal until 
the passing of Naquet's Law in 1884) that, accord- 
ing to the original enactments of the Code, woman 
could arrive at independence, or, to employ Victor 
Hugo's term, attain her majority. 

To remove these disabilities, to reconcile the two 
conflicting aspects of woman's lot, to make her 
legally what she is naturally, has been the main 
object of the feminist movement in France. How 
far it has succeeded we shall attempt to show in 
another chapter. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 

An inquiry among the circulating libraries of 
England and France to-day would probably prove 
that from the general reading public there is no 
great demand for the works of George Sand. 
Among literary people, however, the case is differ- 
ent. Literary critics from Sainte-Beuve to Mr. 
Edmund Gosse, from Thackeray to Matthew 
Arnold, from Taine to W. H. Myers and Lord 
Morley, have never ceased to be occupied with her 
novels. Saint-Beuve, her life-long friend, was one 
of the first to discern her genius. Thackeray, 
though his Victorian mind revolted from what he 
called her "philosophical friskiness," her "topsy- 
turvyfication of morality," though Lelia seemed to 
him "a thieves' and prostitutes' apotheosis," was, 
notwithstanding, compelled to admit that of the 
novelist's craft she was "the very ablest practitioner 
in France," that her prose was "exquisite," that "her 
brief, rich, melancholy sentences" had a charm "like 
the sound of country bells — provoking I don't know 

178 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 179 

what vein of musing and meditation and falling 
sweetly and sadly on the ear." Matthew Arnold 
considered her "the greatest literary force in 
Europe," W. H. Myers describes her as "the most 
noteworthy woman, with perhaps one exception, 
who has appeared in literature since Sappho." 
Lord Morley finds in her writings "the high-water 
mark of prose," ^ and in the attitude of her mind 
"a stirring rebuke to loitering quietism of brain and 
all cowardice of soul." ^ To some of us who to-day 
take down from their shelves long-closed volumes, 
Consuelo for example, le Compagnon du Tour de 
France, le Peche de M, Antoine, Spiridion, Mile, 
la Quintinie, les Lettres d'lm Voyageur, le Journal 
d'un Voyageur pendant la Guerre, it may seem that 
the problems there discussed are much the same as 
those which agitate us to-day, and that the solutions 
there propounded are not unlike those after which 
we ourselves are striving. And in any case, in her 
unconquerable hopefulness, her complete sincerity, 
and her unflinching intellectual courage we shall 
never fail to find inspiration and encouragement. 

Servants of the Ideal is the title bestowed by a 
French professor ^ of to-day on many of the con- 

^ Recollections, I, 66. "^ Ibid., 1, 80-81. 

^ Albert Leon Guerard, Assistant Professor of French in 
the Leland Stanford Junior University, California: French 
Prophets of Yesterday, pp. 130 et seq. 



180 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

temporaries of George Sand, Lamennais, Lacor- 
daire, Lamartine, Leroux, and others. She, too, 
may lay claim to that title. For in the world of 
ideals she lived, moved, and had her being. 

It is one of many proofs of the richness of French 
fiction that its history presents us with two con- 
temporaries, each in his own way master of one 
of the two divergent tendencies of his art : George 
Sand unsurpassed in the idealistic romance, Honore 
de Balzac, equally unsurpassed in the realistic novel. 
Few critics of either have been able to resist draw- 
ing a comparison between these two writers. 
Among those who have yielded to the temptation 
are Taine, C. Bronte, Thackeray, and W. H. 
]Myers. Charlotte Bronte, though she finds many 
of George Sand's views of life untruthful, herself 
fantastical, fanatical, impractical, misled by her 
feelings, nevertheless thinks she has a better nature 
than M. de Balzac, that her brain is larger, her heart 
warmer.^ But no one has stated the contrast better 
than the writers themselves: Mme. Sand and M. de 
Balzac in conversation with one another admirably 
summed up the difference. The great George had 
suggested that the title of Balzac's work, instead 

^Charlotte Bronte to G. H. Lewes, October S, 1850. See 
Clement Shorter, The Brontes — Life and Letters, II, 473. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 181 

of la Comedie humaine should have been la Trage- 
die humaine, "Yes," he replied, "and you write 
VEpopee humaine/' "But what I should like to 
write," retorted George Sand, "is VEglogue hu- 
maine, le Poeme, le Roman humain. You, in short, 
wish and know how to paint man as you see him. 
So be it. I feel constrained to paint him as I wish 
him to be, as I believe he will be." ^ 

Thus, appealing more to the emotions than to the 
intellect, she endeavours, in her novels, to set up 
before mankind a standard of perfectibility. "The 
emotions of reality are as nothing," she maintains, 
"in comparison with those we may derive from 
imagination.^ 

There is one of her books which no one who would 
understand the working of her mind and the quality 
of her genius can afford to neglect. I refer to les 
Lettres d'un Voyageur, Though not avowedly auto- 
biographical, it sheds as bright a light on her life 
as VHistoire de ma Vie or her published correspond- 
ence and souvenirs. For in les Lettres d'uAi Voy- 
ageur we find her under the thinnest of disguises 
corresponding frankly with her friends, whom it is 
not difficult to identify. Especially interesting are 

^ Preface to le Compagnon du Tour de France.. 
* VHistoire de ma Vie, IX, 7. 



182 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

those letters in which she recalls scenes and experi- 
ences of her childhood. 

"When I was young," she writes,^ "and kept my 
flocks in the most peaceful and rustic country in 
the world, I had all manner of grand ideas about 
Versailles, Saint-Cloud, Trianon, and the palaces 
which my grandmother was for ever describing to 
me as the most beautiful under the sun. I used to 
wander along the field-paths at nightfall or in the 
early morning, and in lofty lines build Trianon, 
Versailles, Saint- Cloud out of the white mist hover- 
ing over the meadows. A hedge of old half -hewn 
trees rising out of a ditch would become a whole 
people of marble tritons and naiads . . . the 
copses and vineyards of our hills beds of yew and 
box ; nut trees bordering our fields the majestic elms 
of vast royal parks; and a ribbon of smoke rising 
from the roof of a cottage half hidden in the trees, 
drawing a blue, trembling line through the verdure, 
would seem to my eyes that magnificent jet d'eau 
which the humble citizen of Paris was permitted to 
see playing on high days and holidays, but which for 
me was one of the marvels in the world of my imag- 
ination." 

Here, in the allegorical manner she loved, George 

^Nouvelle Edition (1869), pp. 40-41. 




George Sand 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 183 

Sand analyses the working of her own mind, not in 
childhood only, but more or less throughout her 
whole life, and especially during the first thirty of 
her seventy-two years. 

The dangers of this idealising method are obvi- 
ous. That the ideahst herself was conscious of 
some of them, appears in the following sentence 
which succeeds that quoted above. 

"Thus," she continues, "I drew in lofty lines the 
exaggerated model of the little ^ things I have since 
seen. It is owing to my faculty for making my 
brain a microscope that actuality has appeared to 
me so small and so mean. I have been long in learn- 
ing to accept it without disdain and to find in it 
individual beauties and objects for admiration quite 
different from those sought." 

These words may explain a somewhat discon- 
certing phrase of Ferdinand Brunetiere.^ One is 
astonished to find him referring to "the realism 
which George Sand helped to bring into existence." 
Many of us have not been accustomed to associate 
in any way the word "realism" with George Sand. 
And indeed it hardly went further than taking real- 
ity as her starting-point. For reality, at any rate 

^ The italics are mine. 

^ Manuel de I'Histoire de la Litterature Frangaise, p. 475. 



184 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

during the first part of her literary life, was not 
enough for her. Dans le vrai, quelque beau qu'iL 
soit, j'aime a bdtir encore, she wrote. That, in her 
endeavour to control her soaring imagination, she 
often failed is proved by the fact that the first part 
of her long novels is almost invariably the best. As 
they continue they are inclined to fall away into 
vagueness. The same may be said of some of her 
ideals. Founded on solid rock they soar high, until 
they become mere castles in the air. But in order 
to understand them, it will be necessary briefly to 
summarise the chief events in her life. 

Armandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, known to the 
world under her nom de plume of George Sand, 
was born at Paris on the 1st of July, 1804. Her 
descent is one of the most interesting and significant 
in the history of literature. For it offers an almost 
complete explanation of many of her most salient 
qualities. It affords a striking justification of the 
theory of inheritance first applied in literature 
by Sainte-Beuve and enthusiastically adopted by 
Taine. For George Sand, the apostle of solidarity, 
the advocate of social equality, was in herself a bond 
of union between the classes. 

Her great-great-grandfather was Frederick 
Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 185 

Poland,^ himself the grandfather of Louis XVI of 
France. The natural son of Frederick Augustus 
II was that famous hero of romance, le Marechal 
de Saxe. By a lady-in-waiting of the French 
Court, Mile, de Verrieres, he had a daughter who 
married M. Dupin de Francueil, who figures as a 
celebrated beau in Mme. d'Epinay's Memoirs. M. 
and Mme. Dupin de Francueil were the grandpar- 
ents of George Sand. Her father, Maurice Dupin, 
was an officer distinguished in the wars of the 
Republic and the Empire. Her mother was a 
Parisian grisette, a milliner, Sophie Delaborde, 
granddaughter of one of those bird-fanciers, with 
whose quaint little shops on the Quai des Mar- 
chands d'Oiseaux every tourist in Paris is familiar. 
From her noble, even royal, ancestors Aurore 
Dupin inherited distinction of thought and manner. 

^ Frederick Augustus II 



F. Augustus III Maurice, Marechal 

I de Saxe 

Marie Josepha m. \ 

Dauphin, son of Mme. Dupin de 

Louis XV Francueil 

I I 

Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, Charles X Maurice Dupin 

George Sand. 



186 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

However frankly she may deal with certain aspects 
of life she is never vulgar. Despite her insignificant 
appearance, her taille chetive, she was always une 
grande dame, very impressive with those wondrous 
piercing eyes, into which, said de Tocqueville, when 
he met her in 1848, her whole mind seemed to have 
gone. From her humble maternal ancestors on 
the other hand, she inherited a simplicity of manner, 
an ardour for the people's cause, a deep sense of 
the people's wrongs, and a passionate love for 
Nature — embracing the whole creation, rocks, 
stones, plants, and animals. Geology and botany 
were among the favourite pursuits of her later 
years. 

Aurore's father died in 1808. For the next four- 
teen years of her life she lived mainly with her 
paternal grandmother. 

She spent most of her days at the family country 
seat of Nohant, in Berry, on the upper reaches of 
the Indre River and not far from the ancient city 
of Bourges. The delights of that rustic existence, 
the charms of her native province, inspired many of 
the most beautiful pages of her novels and autobi- 
ography. In this latter work, VHistoire de ma Vie, 
she relates in minute detail the events and impres- 
sions of her childhood, how her grandmother 
brought her up on the principles of Rousseau's 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 187 

Emile, letting her run wild through the woods and 
fields, encouraging her to associate freely with the 
peasant children, abstaining from instilling into 
her youthful mind any definite religious dogma. 

The author of VHistoire de ma Vie tells also how 
occasionally she and her grandmother travelled in 
their cumbrous berline to Paris. The journey in 
those early years of the nineteenth century was not 
lacking in adventure. The great Forest of Orleans, 
through which the travellers had to pass, was still 
infested with brigands, and Mme. Dupin loved to 
relate how she remembered not long ago having 
seen the corpses of highwaymen hanging from the 
trees whereon they had been gibbeted.^ 

At Paris she was allowed to see her mother, 
whom she adored. The young Mme. Dupin came 
every day to take her little girl delicious rambles 
through the city which she knew so well. Paris, 
how^ever, could not replace Nohant in Aurore's 
affection. ''Uair de Paris'' she writes, "m'a tou- 
jours ete contraire'' 

At thirteen this free, open-air life ended. Aurore 
was sent for three years (1817-20) to the convent of 
the English Augustines at Paris. Here her mind 
took that mystic bent from which it never complete- 
ly recovered. Here for a while Aurore became an 

^VHistoire de ma Vie (ed. 1879), Vol. I, Part III, p. 290. 



188 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

orthodox Christian. And after she had passed out 
of the orthodox phase she continued to respect 
Christian influence, both on the development of her 
own mind and on that of her generation. Writing 
in 1841 she asks: "What was it that mysteriously 
detached our young souls from the somewhat dei- 
fied egoism which, we must admit, was inculcated 
in our families? Was it not . . . the Christian 
idea, that is, the distant reflection of an ancient 
philosophy, which had passed into a religion, as 
must any philosophy which is at all profound?" ^ 

For two years after leaving the convent, Aurore 
lived at Nohant, by day absorbed in rural pursuits, 
rambling on foot or horseback over the countryside, 
by night plunged in desultory and diverse reading. 
Her favourite convent book, The Imitation, was 
now abandoned for le Genie du Christiamsme , 
Then metaphysics enthralled her — Aristotle. 
Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Pascal, 
Bossuet, but above all Leibnitz, who remained her 
philosopher of predilection. 

It was in these days that she acquired the habit 
of reading or writing far into the night and rising 
late in the morning. "Beranger called to see me," 
she wrote in 1833 to Sainte-Beuve, "but, as it was 

^ Correspondance, II, 185. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 189 

before two o'clock, I was not up/' ^ Thirty-five 
years later, when visiting her friend Mme. Adam 
(Juliette Lamber) in the south of France, she used 
not to appear before the mid-day meal. 

At ten in the evening she wished her guests good- 
night, and retired to her room to work until the 
small hours of the morning. Mme. Adam, whose 
room was beneath her guest's, used to hear her 
moving about. Her cigarettes and a glass of water 
were all she needed for her long vigils.^ 

But we are anticipating. To return to her youth. 
In 1822, her grandmother's death left Aurore on 
the hands of her father's family. She was a trouble- 
some, wayward girl of eighteen, moody even to 
the point of wishing at times to commit suicide. 
With her mother she found it impossible to live. 
Visiting some friends of her father's she met a 
somew^hat mysterious person, Casimir Dudevant, 
whom she was ultimately to marry. According to 
her own account in VHistoire de ma Vie, their sen- 
timents for one another were little more than pla- 
tonic. Dudevant never spoke to her of love, and 
brutally avowed that he considered her neither 
beautiful nor pretty. Yet she cared for him, but 

^Letter, November 14, 1833, quoted by Sainte-Beuve, 
Portraits Contemporains, p. 519- 

* Life of Mme. Adam, by Winifred Stephens, p. H7. 



190 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

only as a brother. With some surprise she recorded 
twenty years later that he had inspired her neither 
with instinctive loathing nor with moral aversion. 
Certain critics ^ mistrust this narrative, written 
when the narrator found it necessary to justify her 
separation from her husband. At any rate, if the 
Dudevants were mutually in love the passion soon 
faded. Their marriage proved unfortunate in 
every way. After nine years of a miserable exist- 
ence, husband and wife agreed to live apart for six 
months of every year. The other six months Mme. 
Dudevant, who could not tolerate the idea of being 
parted from her little son Maurice, was to spend 
under the same roof as her husband. 

Dudevant kept control of all his wife's property, 
granting her, out of her own estate, a meagre al- 
lowance of 300 francs a month. Out of this she 
was supposed to keep herself and her baby girl, 
Solange, whom she was permitted to take with her 
to Paris. 

Later the separation became definitive; divorce, 
in the days before Naquet's Law (1884), was il- 
legal ; and it was only after a series of lawsuits that 
Mme. Dudevant regained her property and was 
able to return to her beloved Nohant. Dudevant 

^ See le Premier Armour de George Sand, by Ernest Seil- 
liere, "la Revue Hebdomadaire," March 30, 1918. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 191 

lived to be an old man, dying in 1871, five years 
before his wife, whom he had not met since their 
separation in 1836. 

In the early days of her independence at Paris 
Mme. Dudevant was living a Bohemian life. She 
might have been seen in cafes, law-courts, and the- 
atres, smoking a pipe and taking snuff, wearing a 
long frock coat, a woollen muffler and a soft felt 
hat over the black locks which fell on to her shoul- 
ders. She was hard put to it to support herself and 
baby Solange. 

By first one occupation, then another, she tried 
to add to her slender income. Translation, painting 
snuff-boxes, drawing portraits, were some of the 
arts she practised before she found that she could 
write. Then in collaboration with a young fellow 
Berrichon, Jules Sandeau, under the name of Jules 
Sand, she contributed articles to le Figaro, pub- 
lished a short story, la Prima Donna, in "la Revue 
de Paris," and in 1831 a novel. Rose et Blanche. 

The editor of "la Revue de Paris," H. Dupuy, 
having discovered which part of this work came 
from Mme. Dudevant's pen, was struck by her tal- 
ent. He proposed to her to write a novel on her 
own account. This suggestion resulted in Indiana, 
written at Nohant in a few months, and published 
in 1832 in two volumes under the nom de plume of 



192 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

George Sand. At one bound its author became 
famous. Every one talked of Indiana. Every one 
read Indiana, To the horror of her critic — and 
later her lifelong friend — Sainte-Beuve, another 
novel, Valentine, followed in two months. But 
Sainte-Beuve's misgivings were ill-founded. Val- 
entine was from every point of view a stronger, a 
wider, a more artistic production than its predeces- 
sor. 

Aurore Dudevant, under the name of George 
Sand, was now completely launched on that literary 
career, one of the most prolific in the whole history 
of literature, which was to last forty-six years, and 
to produce considerably more than one hundred 
volumes.^ 

Her early works, comprising Indiana (1832), 
Valentine (1832), Lelia (1833), Leone Leoni 
(1834), Jacques (1834) and a later volume Elle et 
LiUi (1858) , are essentially novels of passions. Hav- 
ing become deeply interested in religious and social 
questions, she wrote her philosophical and socialist 
romances: among the chief of which are Spiridion 
(1840), les Sept Cordes de la Lyre (1840), Mile. 

^ Cf. Bruneti^re, Manuel de VHistoire de la Litterature 
Frangaise, p. 476, n. 3. Her complete works form over a 
hundred volumes (Michel Levy's edition), not including the 
four volumes of VHistoire de ma Vie and the six volumes 
that have appeared up to now of her correspondence. 




An intimate portrait of AI. Anatole France in his study 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 198 

la Quintinie (1863), le Compagnon du Tour de 
France (1S4<0) , Mauprat {1SS6) , Conmelo (1842- 
43) , Za Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844) , le Peche de 
Monsieu r A ntoine ( 1 845 ) . 

In 1843 she published a novel, Teveiino, which 
is little more than a charming dialogue on art, spe- 
cially music, while Lucrezia Floriani (1847) and 
its sequel le Chateau des Desertes are concerned 
with dramatic art, chiefly with comedy. 

But her most finished masterpieces are the pas- 
toral romances la 31 are au Diable (1846) , la petite 
Fadette (1849), Franfois le Champi (1850), les 
Maitres Sonneurs (1853). In all these stories the 
scene is laid in the author's beloved Berry, among 
the humble peasants whom she never ceased to love. 
For she was then living at Nohant, and the worst 
storms and tempests of her life were over. 

During the passionate period of her career she 
had remained, to use her own expression, un esprit 
chercJieur. Her novels of that period INIr. W. H. 
Myers has happily termed romances of search. She 
had, however, gradually been evolving toward 
something more positive. In 1838 she had written: 
Je suis un peu plus vieille quHl y a deux ans^ et je 
crois que je suis en voie de me reconcilier, ou de 
vouloir bien me reconcilier avec mes contraires? ^ 

^ Correspondance, II, 105. 



194 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Here we find the first glimmering of a new dawn, 
of a new view of life. By mes contraires she proba- 
bly means the actual as opposed to the ideal, the 
utilitarian or ethical as opposed to the purely artis- 
tic view of art for art's sake. Hitherto she had pro- 
fessed to despise la sphere glace e de ce qu'on ap- 
pelle la vie positive} She had posed as being ut- 
terly without le sense de la vie pratique, though in 
reality she was skilled in many practical matters; 
for we surprise her hemming handkerchiefs in a 
Paris salon, though she had mocked at stitchery as 
woman's amusement de captivite. We know that 
at Nohant she won a reputation for succulent con- 
fitures, and that she always proved herself an ex- 
cellent business woman and a first-rate maitresse 
de maison. 

Moreover she was now beginning to take an in- 
terest in wider concerns. Under the influence of 
the celebrated lawyer and journalist, Michel de 
Bourges, she was becoming fervently republican. 
Later she out-distanced de Bourges; and, while he 
settled down into a moderate radical, his political 
disciple continued her progress towards the left un- 
til we find her embracing the socialist doctrines of 
Pierre Leroux. The chief article in her political 

^ Consuelo, I, Chap. XXXIII, p. 294. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 195 

creed was now belief in the people, but the people 
educated. 

"France needs institutions," she wrote to her 
friend IMichei Duvernet,^ one of the chief contrib- 
utors to the liberal newspaper, "le National"; "and 
who will give them to her ? A Messiah ? We don't 
believe in him. Prophets? We have not seen any. 
We ourselves? We cannot peer into the future. 
We know not what shape will be assumed by hu- 
man thought at any given moment. Who, then? 
Why, all of us, the people first, you and I also. The 
moment will inspire the masses. 

"Yes, the masses will be inspired, but on what 
condition? Only on condition that they are en- 
lightened. Enlightened on what? On everything: 
on truth, justice, the religious idea, equality, liberty, 
fraternity, in a word on rights and on duties." 

These matters, she tells Duvernet, are the things 
you must write about. "You must show us where 
right ends and duty begins, how far the individual's 
liberty extends and how far the authority of so- 
ciety. It is for you to give us our political pro- 
gramme, to define the family, to discuss wages, the 
division of labour, the forms of property." 

For the solution of many of these problems, after 
which we are still groping to-day, George Sand 

^ Correspondance, II, 189. 



196 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

looked to the Republic which would be established 
by the Revolution of 1848. She and her friends 
had helped to prepare it, and they staked upon it 
all their most fervent hopes. It brought to George 
Sand her first big political disappointment. She 
had thrown in her lot with the advanced revolution- 
aries of the Louis Blanc and Barbes type. For 
them she had written several Bulletins de la Repub- 
lique, manifestoes circulated throughout France, 
read by the mayors and posted on the doors of pub- 
lic buildings ; for them also she had edited a short- 
lived newspaper, "la Vraie Republique." Never 
had even her ecstatic soul experienced a more burn- 
ing fervour of hope than that which glowed within 
her heart in the early weeks of the Revolution. 

Vive la Republique! Quel reve, quel entliou- 
siasme! she writes, et en meme temps ^ quelle tenu^, 
quel ordre a Paris } 

Nous Vaimons, va, la Republique, en depit de 
tous. Le peuple est debout et diablement beau id, 
Tous les jours et sur tous les points, on plante des 
arbres de la liberte. Ten ai rencontre trots hier en 
diverses rues, des pins immenses portes sur les 
epaules de cinquante ouvriers. En tete le tambour, 
le drapeau, et des bandes de ces beaux travailleurs 
de terre, forts, graves, couronnes de feuillage, la 

^ Correspondance, 111, 9- 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 197 

hichej la pioche ou la cognee sur Vepaule; c'est 
magnifique, c'est plus beau que tous les Robert du 
monde. 

In a few weeks, however, these radiant hopes 
were extinguished. The failure of the national 
workshops, the terrible June riots, resulting in the 
victory of the moderate party, in the imprisonment 
or exile of her friends, in the election of Louis Bon- 
aparte as President of the Republic, finally, two 
years later, in the coup d'etat which established the 
Empire. All these events brought home to her the 
sad consciousness that the consummation of her de- 
sires was not yet. Nevertheless at no time does the 
invincible optimism of George Sand burn more 
brightly than in the face of such disappointments. 
When to the onlooker idealism seemed doomed, 
Vive Videe! cried this unconquerable idealist. Com- 
pelled to admit that the Republican principle had 
sustained a serious defeat,^ she can write notwith- 
standing: "Of course every revolutionary must 
meet with reaction, hatred, threats. Could it be 
otherwise? And what would be the merit of being 
a revolutionary if everything went on smoothly, and 
if one had only to will in order to succeed? No, we 
are now, and perhaps we always shall be, engaged 
in a stubborn conflict." 

^ Correspondance, III, SO. 



198 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

The convulsions of 1848 which shook European 
Society to its foundations seemed to her the idea 
of the future grappling with that of the past. Writ- 
ing to Mazzini, she said : Ce vaste mouvement, c'est 
Veffort de la vie, qui veut sortir du tombeau et 
hriser la pierre du sepulcre, sauf a se hriser elle- 
meme avec les debris, II serait done insense de se 
desesperer; car, si Dieu meme a souffle sur notre 
poussiere pour le rammer, il ne la laisser a pas se 
disperser au veut, Mais est-ce une resurrection de- 
finitive vers laquelle nous nous elancons, ou bien 
n'est'Ce qu'une agitation prophetique, un tressaille- 
ment precurseur de la vie, apres lequel nous dormir- 
ons encore un peu de temps, d'un sommeil moins 
lourd, il est vrai, mais encore accables d'une Ian- 
gueur fat ale? Je le crains,^ 

Alas! the decadence and jobbery of the Second 
Empire, culminating in the debacle of 1870, proved 
her fears to be only too well founded. 

In these our own war-days the reflections of this 
noble, valiant soul, suff*ering under that scourge be- 
neath which we are now smarting, assume the deep- 
est significance. Je ne doute pas de Vavenir, she 
writes, mais le present est fort laid.^ Repoussez 
Vennemi avant tout, , , , Tuons les Prussiens, mais 
ne les hazssons pas,^ Above all things do not de- 

^ Correspondance, III, 69- ^ Ibid., VI, 3. ^ jn^^^ qj 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND I9d 

spair of France, she is expiating her folly. What- 
ever happens she will be born again, elle renaitra, 
quoiquil arrive.^ At the time of the armistice, she 
cries Vive la France! plus que jamais elle est 
grande, bonne surtout, patiente, facile a gouverner,^ 
Si la France est dans le sang, elle nest pas dans la 
houe.^ Le Beau est toujours possible en France^ 

Not even the horrors of the Commune could de- 
stroy her faith in her country and in humanity. She 
regards it as a horrible and regrettable episode, the 
result of excessive material civilisation casting its 
foam to the surface, the cauldron boiling over, on a 
day when the cook's back was turned, but not fun- 
damentally affecting the democratic movement, and 
powerless to shake her faith in the people.^ 

Can George Sand be called a feminist? This is a 
question that has often been asked. But in such an 
idealist we must not expect to find a partisan. 
Sainte-Beuve hoped that so rich, versatile, impetu- 
ous a talent * would never serve any party." His 
wish was fulfilled: there never was a person more 
difficult to label. And she herself strongly objected 
to the process. Inconsistent as it may seem, she 
protests that she is without any philosophic or polit- 
ical mission. Ce n'est pas auoc artistes et auoo rto- 

^ Correspondance, y I, 38, ^ Ibid., 71. ^ Ibid., 74). 

* Ibid,, 88, ^Ibid,, 115. 



200 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

eurs de vous dire comment on influence ses contem- 
porains dans le sens politique, she writes/ "I am 
too ignorant to write anything but stories," she 
pleads ^ when urging her friend, Daniel Stern {la 
Comtesse d'Agoult) , to take up her pen in the fem- 
inist cause. Les politiques purs ^ George Sand al- 
ways despises. Elections and wire-pulling bored 
her. 31 on role de fern me s'y oppose, she protests. 
Ideas, not methods and machiner}^ were her con- 
cern. So she declined to join any feminist society,^ 
and refused an invitation to take what was then the 
revolutionary step of standing as candidate for a 
local government election. One can hardly believe 
that had she lived to-day she would have been an 
anti-suiFragist. Albeit the idea of woman's polit- 
ical emancipation never seems to have entered her 
head. She could write a long letter ^ advocating 
votes for men as a cure for all their ills and describ- 
ing it as universal suffrage without the misnomer 
ever occurring to her. Neither was she actively 
concerned with the economic enfranchisement of 
her sex. The all-important question of woman's 
work and wages does not seem to have interested 
her. 

How comes it, then, that George Sand can ever 

^Journal d'un Voyageur, p. 214. 

* Correspondance, II, 229- ' Ihid., 283. 

*/6aU, I, 250. 'See Souvenirs, pp. 107-125. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 201 

have been regarded as a feminist? And in what 
way may her writings be said to have promoted the 
enfranchisement of women? Chiefly for the very 
reason that she was too broad-minded to be a mere 
feminist, that she regarded the woman question not 
from the feminist, but from the humanitarian point 
of view. Never was there a more fervent advocate 
of human sohdarity. "Let the dawn of justice sur- 
prise us working for all, not conspiring for a few," ^ 
she wrote. Je suis nee, cries Lelia, dans la vallee 
des larmes et tous les malheureux qui ram pent sur 
la terre sont mes freres. Anything approaching to 
a sex war ^ filled Mme. Sand with alarm. Men and 
women must unite, she pleaded, if only for the 
child's sake.^ 

In her earlier years so bitterly did she resent the 
injustice towards women of the French marriage 
laws, that in reply to a young French girl who 
asked her advice, she wrote: "I cannot advise any 
one to contract a marriage sanctioned by a civil law 
which endorses woman's dependence, inferiority, 
and social nullity." ^ Yet in her later works we 
find her a strong advocate of the family. Briser la 
famille, non jamais, she cries.' Her novel, Maii- 

^ Souvenirs, p. 116. ^ Ibid., p. 117. ^ Ibid., p. 270. 

* Correspondance, II, 230. Tlie letter is dated August 28, 
1842. ' Souvenirs, p. 270. 



202 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

prat, is a pgean in honour of the eternity of love be- 
tween husband and wife. Family joys, domestic 
happiness, the prima donna, Consuelo, prizes more 
highly than the intoxication of glory and the rap- 
tures of an artist's life/ Referring to her novels, 
Jean de la Roche and le Marquis de Villemer, one 
of her biographers writes: On na jamais expose 
plus eloquemment la theorie de Vamour dans le 
mariage et du bon sens dans Vamour. 

On the other hand, George Sand's realisation ot 
the importance of the preservation of the family 
did not blind her to the servile position in which that 
institution too often placed women. With her 
friends the Saint-Simonians, she believed that every 
social reform should aim at the physical, moral, and 
intellectual development of the most numerous and 
the most oppressed, that it should tend to replace 
inequality and the privileges of one sex or one class 
by common obligations and common responsibili- 
ties. 

Tyranny she loathed, wheresoever it was exer- 
cised, in church, state, or family. And woman she 
saw to be the victim of tyranny, through man-made 
laws and man-made prejudice.^ 

Like every true-hearted woman she was loyal to 

^ Consuelo, Vol. Ill, Chap. LXXXII, p. 95. 
- Mauprat, p. 211. Souvenirs, p. 262. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 203 

her sex; and she grew furious when she heard it 
abused by her anti-feminist friend, Lamennais, who 
was a latter-day St. Paul. But in reality she was 
under no illusion with regard to woman's weakness- 
es and failings. "Weak and inquisitive, easy vic- 
tims of caprice, agitated by whimsical fancies," is 
the description given of them by Porpora in Consu- 
elo,^ As friends and acquaintances Mme. Sand 
herself always preferred men to women. But, as 
she points out, woman is what men have made her. 
Her inferiority results from man's refusal to grant 
her educational facilities. By education alone, she 
maintains, can effectually be eradicated the deplor- 
able results of the social position to which men had 
relegated women. 

But George Sand's own history proves that after 
all life itself may be the best educator. The follow- 
ing letter,^ written to her would-be biographer 
Louis Ulbach, shows how in her storm-tossed soul 
there came to reign the eventual element of calm. 

"Nohant, 
"November 26, 1869. 

"As for the last twenty-five years, they are not 
interesting. They represent a very calm and very 
happy old age spent with my family. My time 

^ Vol. I, Chap. XX, p. 169. See also Correspondance 
(1839), p. 145, ^Correspondance, V, 329 et seq. 



204 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

passed in amusing the children, botanising a little 
in the summer, taking long walks (I am still a fa- 
mous pedestrian) and writing novels when I can 
find two hours in the day and two hours in the eve- 
ning. I write with ease and with pleasure. It is 
my recreation. For my correspondence is enor- 
mous. That is hard work ... a veritable scourge ! 
But who is without one ? After my death, I hope to 
go to a planet where reading and writing are un- 
known. To do without them one will need to be 
fairly perfect." 

Then she writes of her financial resources, telling 
how she has made over to her children the bulk of 
her fortune, keeping back only a small capital (20,- 
000 francs ) to lighten the burden of the expense of 
her tisanes when she falls ill. 

"Now that my children" [her son Maurice and 
his wife Lina] "keep house, I have time to make 
little excursions into France, for the remote corners 
of France are little known, and they have beauties 
as great as those which are more distant. Thus I 
find the backgrounds of my novels. I like to have 
seen what I describe: it simplifies research and 
study. If I have only three words to say about a 
place, I like to visualize it in my memory and to get 
as much local colour as I can." 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 205 

Here is the realism to which Brunetiere refers.' 
"All this is quite trivial, dear friend. And when 
one is invited by so distinguished a biographer as 
yourself, one would wish to be as great as a pyramid 
in order to merit the honour of occupying it. But I 
cannot rise to it. I am nothing but an ordinary 
woman, to whom has been ascribed fearsome char- 
acteristics, which are quite imaginary. I have been 
accused of not having loved passionately. My life 
seems to me to have been all affection. And I 
should have thought that would have contented 
them. . . . 

"I have remained very cheerful, without enough 
initiative to entertain others, but knowing how to 
help them to entertain themselves. I must have 
serious faults. I am like other people, I do not 
realise them. Neither do I know whether I have 
good qualities and virtues. My mind has been 
much occupied with truth, and in seeking it con- 
sciousness of the ego wanes day by day. You must 
know this from your own experience. If one does 
right, one does not praise oneself for it. One mere- 
ly regards oneself as logical, that is all. If one does 
wrong, it is because one does not realise what one 
is doing. More enlightened, one would never do it 

^Ante, p. 18S. 



206 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

again. This is what we should all aim at. I do not 
believe in evil, I only believe in ignorance. 

"George Sand." 

Written half a century ago, this explanation of 
conduct differs little from that of the most modern 
psychologists. 

The serene atmosphere of this letter suggests 
that the writer had attained to that ideal old age, 
to that sense of calm and freedom, which, in the 
words of Plato's Cephalus, comes, "when the pas- 
sions release their hold" and "we are freed from the 
grasp of not one mad master but of many." 

Thus, in 1835, a brief interval between two of her 
numerous heart adventures, George Sand writes: ^ 
"Passions and infatuations have in days gone by 
rendered me extremely unhappy. Now of infatua- 
tions I am thoroughly" [an expression at that time 
somewhat premature] "cured by the exercise of my 
will, of passion I shall soon be by age and reflection. 
In every other respect I have always been and al- 
ways shall be perfectly happy, consequently just 
and good, except in my love affairs, in which I am 
worse than the devil, because then I become ill, 
splenetic, and rash." 

Here Mme. Sand, on the verge of maturity, ac- 

^ To Everard, in Lettres d'un Voyageur, p. 158. 



THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 207 

curately foresees her own old age, and on the whole 
faithfully describes her own temperament. "Lib- 
ertinism," writes one of her English critics, John 
Oliver Hobbes,^ "was not her character, it was only 
a characteristic. Her character was tender, exqui- 
sitely patient, and good-natured. She would take 
cross humanity in her arms and carry it out into the 
sunshine of the fields, she would show it flowers and 
birds, sing songs to it, tell it stories, recall its orig- 
inal beauty.'' 

^ In her "Introduction" to the English translation of 
Mauprat (Heinemann, 1901). 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC AND THE FRENCH- 
WOMAN'S WAR- WORK 

The cult of Jeanne d'Arc was part of that wave 
of patriotic sentiment which increasing German ag- 
gressiveness caused to sweep over France during 
the decade immediately preceding the War. 

During all the five hundred years since her mar- 
tyrdom never before had she been so passionately 
adored by all classes and creeds. The Maid became 
the symbol of la patrie; and in her presence, as a 
foretaste of that sacred union the War was to ac- 
complish, many party differences were forgotten. 
In eloquent pages she was celebrated alike by Ana- 
tole France the socialist, Gabriel Hanotaux the rad- 
ical, Maurice Barres the reactionary, proving the 
truth of Deroulede's device: Repuhlicains, royal- 
istes, bonapartistes, ce sont des prenoms, Francois 
est le nom de famille. 

The year before the War, in December, 1913, 
Maurice Barres, on the battle-field of Champigny, 
celebrating the anniversary of an earlier defense 

208 



THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC 209 

nationale, cried, "There is not to-day a single 
Frenchman, to whose profoundest veneration 
Jeanne d'Ai-c does not appeal. For every one of 
us she expresses one ideal. For royalists she is the 
loyal subject eager to defend her sovereign; for 
ceesarists, the providential leader arising for the de- 
liverance of the nation in its hour of need; for re- 
publicans the child of the people in greatness of soul 
rising superior to all principalities and powers. 
Even revolutionaries may march beneath her ban- 
ner proclaiming that, having first appeared as a 
stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, she be- 
came an instrument of salvation." 

Of all the figures in the noble pageant of French 
history Joan is the saintliest. Nevertheless, if we 
would speak by the card, Joan is not a saint. Cath- 
olics tell us that her canonisation is as yet incom- 
plete. She has but attained to its penultimate 
stage, beatification. There are three rungs in the 
ladder of sainthood: Veneration, Beatification, 
Sanctification. This second round, which Joan has 
reached, entitles her to have her image placed in 
churches and to intercede with the Almighty for the 
faithful. "I never cease to pray to Joan of Arc for 
my son," said the mother of a French writer serv- 
ing in the trenches. "He has done so much for her 
that she ought to protect him." 



210 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

If before the War the cult of Joan united 
Frenchmen, in these days of resistance to a foreign 
foe it binds them closer still. Now for the French 
nation Joan is pre-eminently "the sister of all who 
have died for their country." 

Nothing touches our French Allies more than the 
tributes of veneration with which Englishmen hon- 
our the Maid whom their ancestors burned. Those 
flowers, tied with the British colours and reverently, 
ever since the beginning of the War, laid by British 
hands upon the scene of her martyi'dom in Rouen 
market-place, have found their way to French 
hearts. 

For four years now throughout the length and 
breadth of France, in church and cathedral, in 
market-place and public-square, the second Sunday 
in May has been celebrated as Joan of Arc's Festi- 
val. In Paris, round Joan's statue in the Place de 
Rivoli, a great concourse gathers on the spot where, 
during her siege of the capital, then in the enemy's 
hands, the Maid fell wounded by an arrow from the 
ramparts. Orleans, of course, has an imposing pro- 
cession. Even in poor bombarded Rheims, in cette 
ville cadavre, there are maimed rites around that 
image of la Pucelle which, before the gaunt, 
battered skeleton of the cathedral, still stands 



THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC 211 

proudly intact save for the loss of half her sword/ 
When, in the Ckambre des Deputes, in 1915, 
Maurice Barres first proposed the institution of this 
national festival, he was met by the objection: 
"How can you mention Joan of Arc while the Eng- 
lish are in France? Do you wish to offend them?" 

Barres replied by quoting Rudyard Kipling's 
lines — 

"Pardoning old necessity — no pardon can efface. 
That undying sin we shared in Rouen market-place.'* 

"Those who raised this outcry," he writes, in his 
Autour de Jeanne d'Arc^ "grossly misjudged the 
seriousness, the sincerity, and the religious con- 
science of modern England." And he recalls 
Joan's summons to the English to cease fighting 
against her countrymen and unite with them in a 
crusade against the Turk. Now that with our be- 
loved Ally, once "our sweet enemy," we do battle 
for civilisation against barbarism, we are indeed 
obeying Joan's behest. 

Days of many kinds we have had in England 
since the beginning of the War. Why should we 
not add to their number a Joan of Arc's Day? We 

^ As I write comes the news that this revered and marvel- 
lously preserved statue is being removed to a place of safety. 

2 Paris: Edouard Champion, 1916. Vendu au profit de la 
Federation des Mutiles de la Guerre. 



212 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

would then celebrate not only Joan's pity for the 
realm of France, but her pity for all who suffer, 
remembering how at the battle of Pathay she was 
seen supporting with her arm the head of a wound- 
ed English soldier! 

If Joan's memory has thus served to bind the 
men of France in bonds of brotherhood, much more 
even has it inspired and united her women. Shortly 
before the May Festival, in 1916, the President of 
the French League of Patriots received the follow- 
ing letter. 

^'Monsieur le President de la Ligue des Patriotes — 

*'The maids of France are possessed by a 
desire to devote themselves to their country and her 
soldiers. Despite their eagerness, however, there 
are many tasks in which they find themselves pow- 
erless to assist those who fight. At Joan of Arc's 
Festival it has been the charming custom of the 
youths of Paris to cover her statues with flowers. 
Might we not this year take their place and off*er 
their homage to the victorious woman warrior? Oc- 
cupied by sacred duties, they would be pleased to 
know how their sisters are preserving their tradi- 
tion. Joan of Arc should not be without flowers in 
the year of victory. For we are confident she will 




M. Maurice Barres 



THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC 213 

grant us that success which the courage and suffer- 
ing of so many Frenchmen have deserved." . . . 

The signatures affixed to this letter are as inter- 
esting and as significant as the letter itself. I select 
a few to show how various were the classes and oc- 
cupations represented. 

Suzanne Guillemot, pupil of the Scola Cantor- 
um; Louise Beneton, member of the Women Stu- 
dents Society, "les Amies de Sainte Genevieve"; 
E. Boubrila, Societe Generale; M. Colange, bank- 
clerk; M. Martin, of the Credit Lyonnais; J. Lag- 
elle, painter; H. Fery, art student; R. Trudon, stu- 
dent at the Ecole des Beaux Arts; M. Pellet, ele- 
mentary school teacher; L. Regraff, draughtswom- 
an; E. Gaubert, typist; B. Vautier, telephone su- 
perintendent; M. Besombes, dressmaker; M. Sais- 
se, student of painting. 

Never, throughout the ages, have Frenchwomen 
been deaf to their country's call. And in this War 
their patriotism has surpassed itself. Perhaps we 
English hardly realise how much we owe to our 
French sisters, how France could not possibly have 
continued her resistance through these four years, 
constituting herself the bulwark between us and 
the enemy, had it not been for the unfailing courage 
and indefatigable perseverance of her women in 



214 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

cultivating the land, carrying on industry and com- 
merce, and manufacturing munitions. 

Summoning his fellow-countrymen to brace 
themselves for a yet more arduous struggle against 
the foe, Anatole France writes: "I don't speak of 
our women. They have already made every effort 
and performed every deed of devotion." 

Of course there are exceptions to prove the rule. 
And we may be sure that they have not passed un- 
noticed by writers of French novels. The authors, 
for example, of la Guerre Madame and Tu n'es 
plus rien,^ inspired by the irresistible tendency of 
their race to reveal the most unpleasant truths, 
doubtless base their fiction on fact. 

But as the past history of France has presented 
a long procession of brave, patriotic women, so they 
have not been lacking in this War. First on the 
roll of honour must stand the noble nuns of Gerbe- 
viller. The chatelaine of Gerbeviller had estab- 
lished a hospital in her beautiful Louis XIV cha- 
teau. Over it, visible to a great distance, floated the 
Red Cross flag. But, as it has so often happened 
in this War, the standard of healing afforded no 
protection. During the German bombardment of 

^Geraldy and Boylesve. See ante, p. 108, for a character 
in M. Boylesve's novel who refuses to be disturbed or in any 
way affected by the War. 



THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC 215 

the village, the chateau suffered first and most ter- 
ribly. Its utter destruction, followed by the sys- 
tematic burning of the village with petroleum and 
by the slaughter of thirty of its inhabitants — men, 
women, and children — provoked even a German 
officer to exclaim: ''This is pure Vandalism." 
Throughout this frightfulness, amidst the smoking 
ruins, the nuns, tranquil and undismayed, directed 
by the valiant Soeur Julie, w^hose name has now be- 
come a household word in France, laboured un- 
ceasingly, binding up wounds, carrying succour to 
the dying, and performing countless other deeds 
of mercy. 

Interminable almost would be the list of the gal- 
lant nurses, lay and religious, who, in the face of 
the advancing enemy, have sacrificed life and limb 
in their country's service. Neither does the nursing 
profession enjoy the monopoly of having produced 
heroines. We must not forget the brave Mme. ]\Ia- 
cherez, whose decision and courage saved Soissons 
from destruction; the valiant telephonists of the 
east who refused to forsake their posts when the 
Germans were advancing; and that courageous 
little Parisian girl, who, maimed for life by a Zep- 
pelin bomb, as soon as she could speak said, "Tell 
Mother it is not serious." 

Not less courageous were the women outside the 



216 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

zone des armees. They have not flinched before the 
most painful duties. And, when the mayors of 
Paris appealed for persons willing to break the 
news of their bereavement to the relatives of those 
who had fallen, volunteers were not lacking. One 
of them in "la Grande Revue" ^ has told with infi- 
nite delicacy and tenderness the story of her sorrow- 
ful ministrations. These touching pages, revealing 
the very heart of the French people, are an eloquent 
testimony to the women's heroic endurance and self- 
sacrifice. "My mission," she writes, "took me 
chiefly to the houses of small shopkeepers and la- 
bourers, to people who do not know how to be any- 
thing but themselves, who are impulsive and simple. 
. . . Their solidarity is admirable. They do not 
always agree. . . . But when misfortune comes, 
they cling together and help one another. And 
now when sorrow visits every street, every house, 
every tenement, never were mutual help and sym- 
pathy more prompt and efficacious." 

The strong fraternal bonds uniting the poor 
proved invaluable to this gentle visitor in enabling 
her to discover how best to approach and to break 
the news to the bereaved. Her inquiries, however 
discreet, quickly aroused the sense of compassion — 

^ The article is entitled "L'Arriere tragi que." September, 
1916. 



THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC 217 

appealing to that eagerness to render service which 
characterises those who are constantly confronted 
by life's difficulties. Not even the concierge, that 
most maligned and ridiculed type of female, proved 
an exception to this rule. Her advice in suggesting 
which member of the family should be first ap- 
proached, or perhaps brought down into the office 
to be spoken to apart, was most useful. Nowhere 
in the world is there a more passionate mother than 
the Frenchwoman. And the breaking of the sor- 
rowful tidings to her was the most agonising part 
of this sad service. "They are lacerated," writes 
the visitor, "to the depths of their being. . . . 
Whether a grown man or a youth, the dead son in- 
stantly becomes the child again, the little child, who 
was born, suckled, cared for, loved with a woman's 
secret pride in her male offspring. . . . More than 
the wife or the sister, the mother thinks of the body, 
of that flesh of her flesh, which she cannot tolerate 
the idea of forsaking. 'Where have they laid him? 
Do you know? Is he in a cemetery where I can go 
and visit his grave ?' . . . And if for once you can 
tell them their child rests in a real cemetery, one 
of those peaceful little village burying-grounds oil 
Von est hien, they sigh, relieved, soothed for the 
moment." 

Then there were the widows. The writer of the 



218 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

article proudly testifies to the loyalty and devotion 
she discovered among the stricken recipients of her 
sorrowful tidings, and to tell how often, in the 
course of her preliminary inquiries, she heard the 
expression: "What a pity! They were such a 
united couple!" And where, as among the poor, 
there is little privacy, where everything is known 
such testimony may be trusted. "There are far 
more united couples among our people than is often 
thought," she remarks. "There is more sexual mo- 
rality among the populace of Paris than you might 
believe." "I be faithless to my husband whilst he is 
at the front!" exclaimed a Paris washerwoman. 
"No, indeed, he could not protect himself." 

This messenger of grief, going hither and thither 
for two whole years on her sad errands, finding 
sorrow everywhere, heard no accent of revolt. The 
sufferers accepted la guerre sacree. They cried 
even in the depths of their anguish, Vive la France! 

How many of those who have suffered find work 
their supreme consolation. Promptly and cour- 
ageously in the first days of mobilisation the women 
of France took up the tasks of the husbands, sons, 
brothers they sent to the front, doing just what was 
most needed, through all classes of the population, 
from the duchess who scoured pots and pans in the 
hospital kitchen, and the banker's wife, rising at 



THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC 219 

four o'clock in the morning to make herself ac- 
quainted with the books before customers arrived, 
down to the working man's wife, who did her hus- 
band's work on the farm, or filled his post in bake- 
house, shop, omnibus, tramway or railway station. 

Few are the Frenchwomen upon whom the War 
has not left its mark. Not even the most excitable 
have escaped its steadying, sobering influence. 
Thus, at the Conservatoire, during the annual Con- 
cours de Comedie, the popular dramatist, M. Maur- 
ice Donnay, notices that Phedre and Celimene, even 
at the end of a long day of suspense, no longer in- 
dulge in crises de nerfs or break forth into violent 
vituperations when the jury fail to crown their fa- 
vourite candidate. "No," he writes,^ * 'those young 
girl students have seen around them too much 
mourning, suffering, and sorrow. In the intervals 
between their classes and their study, they have 
found time to play to the wounded in the hospitals 
or at matinees in aid of some war- work. Their 
leisure hours have been occupied with the care of 
children, of old people and of other sufferers, to 
whom they are sisters, friends, marraines. And it 
has all given them brave hearts and strong nerves." 

Many French actresses, thrown out of employ- 

* Notes sur la Guerre, "Revue Hebdomadaire," March SO, 
1918. 



220 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

ment by the closing of the theatres, have devoted 
themselves to war-work. Some have taken up nurs- 
ing. One graceful stage beauty I saw helping Dr. 
Barthe de Sanfort, the inventor of Amhrine/ in 
his hospital at Issy-les-Moulineaux. I watched her 
delicate fingers spray the healing salve on to the 
wounds of a stalwart blacksmith; and it was a joy 
to witness the poor suiFerer's relief from pain. An- 
other winsome comedienne, following the example 
of ISIarie Antoinette, has become a dairymaid. To- 
day in Paris markets she is as renowned for her 
butter and her cheeses as she was on the stage for 
her understudying of JMme. Bartet. 

Latin women everywhere have been slower than 
their Anglo-Saxon sisters to learn the importance 
of united action. Such a thing, I am told, was un- 
known among Frenchwomen in the 1870 War. 
Now, however, the women of France are finding 
one another. And in the vanguard of this signifi- 
cant movement are the French Feminist Societies, 
notably, the Conseil National des Femmes Fran- 
daises, presided over by Mme. Jules Siegfried, and 
the Union Fran^aise pour le Suffrage des Femmes, 
the president of which, Mme. de Witt- Schlumb erg- 
er, has five sons and one son-in-law in the army. 

For some years a section of the National Council, 

^ See ante, p. 75. 



THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC 221 

under the presidency of Mme. Julien Koechlin, had 
been occupied with the organisation of women's la- 
bour. In the first days of the War, Mme. Koech- 
lin's committee approached the Minister of Labour, 
who put it in touch with the War Office. At the 
end of August M. Marcel Sembat, Minister of Pub- 
lic Works, placed at its disposal the beautiful old 
palace in the Rue des Saints-Peres, which before 
the War was the Government School of Bridges 
and Highways. Here the committee established its 
depot. In these fine, lofty halls were the cutting- 
out rooms, the weighing rooms, and the secretary's 
office. Here work w^as given out to the affiliated 
sixty-five self-supporting workrooms of Paris, 
which employed three thousand five hundred wom- 
en. The War Office was the committee's chief cus- 
tomer. In the first three months of the War it 
had been supplied with one hundred and twenty- 
seven thousand garments. 

At the invitation of the organiser, Mme. Louise 
Compain, vice-president of the National Council 
of French Women, I visited one of the affiliated 
workrooms, occupying two rooms on the ground 
floor of a house in a typical working-class quarter. 
The windows, giving on a courtyard planted with 
plane trees, were wide open to admit the gorgeous 
sunlight and the breath of spring in the air. Be- 



222 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

yond was a vast clearing, made for the construction 
of new buildings, and revealing in gaunt nakedness 
the sky-scrapers, seven storeys high, in the next 
street. 

Within sounded merrily the click of knitting- 
needles and the buzz of conversation. The twenty 
women then assembled (forty were on the books) 
were either the wives of soldiers at the front or 
workers thrown out of employment by the War. 
Some were stout and elderly, of the cook class ; some 
of uncertain age, prim and neat, looked like book- 
keepers or manageresses of dressmaking depart- 
ments ; the youth and smartness of others suggested 
the midinettes, who in peace days, at noon, used 
to flock gaily through Paris streets. 

Most of the work was done at home. But the 
women met two afternoons a week to give in the 
garments (in this workroom all knitted or cro- 
cheted), to receive payment and new work, and to 
hear a reading or a talk by Mme. Compain. The 
reading that afternoon was one of Pierre Mille's 
humorous stories. The prices paid were 3 fcs. for 
socks, 2 fcs. mittens, 2.75 fcs. knitted and 2.45 fcs. 
crocheted gloves, 8.50 fcs. scarves, and 12 fcs. jer- 
seys. The workers received these sums less the cost 
of the wool and five per cent, deducted for expenses. 

As the War dragged on, as its demands in- 



THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC 223 

creased, and as industrial conditions, dislocated in 
the first days of mobilisation, righted themselves, 
the need for these workrooms ceased. In 1916 there 
were few, if any, left open. The workers had 
found employment in the munition factories which 
had sprung up all over France. 

One of these I visited in the autumn of 1916. It 
was a world in itself, employing no fewer than nine 
thousand workers, five thousand four hundred of 
whom were women. There, in the midst of these 
novel surroundings, one may see the pre-War mid- 
inette preserving, in grime and dust and glare and 
oil, much of that daintiness which used to delight 
the eyes of noontide Paris. She has not forgotten 
how to twist her hair to a bewitching angle, how to 
wear her collar with a becoming grace. She refuses 
to submit to the black overall's uniformity. If it 
suits her she affects it. If not, she substitutes a 
pinafore of khaki, blue or lilac, or she may even 
wear unprotected her blouse and skirt. From be- 
neath her smock she allows to peep a frill or a 
ruffle. And if she wears a cap it is like those in 
Rowlandson's pictures. She loves to pin a flower 
into her belt and to decorate her lathe with roses. 
In their incongruous framework of steel and iron a 
whole row of fragrant blossoms that October after- 



224 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

noon were suggesting the glory and the sunshine of 
the autumn day without. 

The workshop's din and turmoil seemed power- 
less to damp the midinette's spirits. Through the 
whirring of machinery, her laughter rang almost 
as merrily as when the striking of the noonday 
clock let her loose from her embroidery frame into 
the streets of Paris. The gay smile that greeted 
me seemed to say that she was pleased and proud 
to be seen toiling so bravely. And when I asked, 
"But don't you find this work terribly hard?" the 
answer was invariably, 3Iais pas du tout, madame. 

Of course, the hardness of the work varies con- 
siderably; for in every process of shell-making — 
drop-forging, machining, testing, etc. — women are 
employed. And in France, by the way, our dilu- 
tion of labour difficulty is unknown. The pleasant- 
est and easiest work was that of the girls who guided 
the little electric cars laden with shells. They tipped 
their loads automatically into a railway wagon 
which conveyed them to another factory, where 
they were fitted with fuses. The cheerfulness of 
these girl-drivers reminded me of the hilarity of the 
pit-boys, riding in the tiny trucks which circulated 
through the galleries of a North of England coal- 
mine I once visited. "You like this work?" I asked 
one of these j^oungsters. "Oh, it's a lark, Missie!" 



THE CULT OF JEANNE D'aRC 225 

he exclaimed, while his eyes twinkled and his black 
little face expanded into a grin. 

But to represent even the midinette turned mu- 
nition worker as always merry would be to give a 
very false impression. My visit to this huge Paris 
factory was in the early afternoon when the work- 
ers had been refreshed by their midday meal and 
an hour's rest. It requires no effort of imagination 
to realise that, as the ten-hours' day or night drags 
on, there arrives a time when "the grasshopper be- 
comes a burden," when every bone in the body 
aches, when the tired worker, as she passes through 
the factory turnstile on her way homewards, feels 
like a washed-out rag, too fatigued even to eat, de- 
siring one thing only — to sink into a long, un- 
troubled sleep. 

Nevertheless, the workers' healthy faces and 
sprightly forms do not suggest that this fatigue is 
permanently injurious. I can see now the magnifi- 
cent figure of a tall, handsome brunette. Clad in 
black from head to foot, her brown eyes flashing, 
she stood, like a veritable goddess, superbly drop- 
forging, while the attendant men, bared to the 
waist, worked around her. I paused to watch her. 
She was far too busy to talk, had the din permitted 
conversation. But it was with a pleased and proud 
glance that she answered my appreciative smile. 



226 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

While admiring these courageous war-workers 
one's heart bleeds to see the creatures who ought to 
be creating life, wearing out their strength in forg- 
ing implements for life's destruction. 

And especially does this reflection come home as 
one talks to the mothers at work in these factories. 
For not a few to the question, "What was your 
work before you came here?" answered, "I looked 
after my children, madame." And the one plain- 
tive note came from the mothers. "What have you 
done with your children?" I asked. "Ah, ma- 
dame," was the wistful reply, "I have to pay some 
one to look after them. It is expensive, and how 
do I know whether my bairns are properly cared 
for?" 

The absence of a creche and also of a restaurant 
from this factory, and from many others through- 
out France, seemed a serious neglect. It is, how- 
ever, being gradually remedied. 

To many numerous war-works of mercy, ably 
carried on by Frenchwomen, it is unnecessary for 
me to refer in this chapter, because the subject has 
already been admirably treated by Mrs. Gertrude 
Atherton in her book. The Living Present} Just 
a word, however, as to an ever-widening field of ac- 
tivity, which I do not think Mrs. Atherton men- 

^ London: John Murray, 1917. 



THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC 227 

tions : this is the Society for Assisting Prisoners of 
War and the occupants of internment camps in 
Germany. There is no more convincing proof of 
Frenchwomen's organising capacity than the So- 
ciety's busy, spacious rooms in the Champs Elysees, 
where hundreds of feminine fingers are ceaselessly 
preparing and packing parcels destined now, not 
only for the enemy's country, but for France, for 
those whom the invader, having despoiled of all they 
possess, is sending out of the occupied regions. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 

The history of woman's emancipation in France 
is not likely to refute Renan's contention that a 
few days of revolution may carry humanity farther 
on the path of progress than a generation of peace. 
For we can already say without exaggeration that 
the cause of woman's freedom and independence has 
advanced in these four war years more rapidly than 
in the previous half-century. During those fifty 
years, however, the cause was not stationary, for at 
least the foundations of progress were being laid. 

Thus, in 1884, the Loi Naquet, by legalising di- 
vorce, although not on equal grounds for both sexes, 
granted a certain liberty to women who were vic- 
tims of some unhappy marriage of convenience. In 
1896 married women received the right to dispose 
of their own earnings; and in 1897 they were recog- 
nised as competent to witness legal documents. 

But more important even than these legal meas- 
ures was the changed attitude towards life which 
came over the young Frenchwoman of the 'eighties. 

228 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 229 

It was due partly to the superseding of the convent 
school by the girls' lifcee and to the admission of 
women to university courses and lectures. To real- 
ise the magnitude of this revolution one has only to 
compare the young French girl of 1910 with her 
grandmother at a similar age. The latter had been 
brought up with her mind padlocked securely ac- 
cording to the principle approved by INIoliere in the 
well-known lines — 

II n'est pas bien honnete, et pour heaucoup de causes 
Qu*une femme etudie et sache tant de choses?- 

Consequently the young French girl's ignorance on 
fundamental matters made her the laughing-stock 
of novelists and dramatists, who jeered at her as 
la petite oie blanche ("little white goose"). In 
almost oriental seclusion, remote from life's actual- 
ities, she was kept until the day of her marriage 
with a husband whom she hardly knew and whom 
her family took care should be old enough to assume 
the position of guardian now relinquished by her 
father or some male relative.^ 

^ See also our own poet. Prior — 

"Be to her virtues very kind, 
Be to her faults a little blind. 
And clap a padlock on her mind." 
^ It is only since the War, in 1917, that the law has per- 
mitted women to act as guardians to their own children. 



230 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

On the rare occasions when mademoiselle was 
permitted to emerge from her seclusion she was 
under the strictest family supervision: "Father on 
the right, mother on the left, brother in front, uncle 
behind, governess all round." 

Horrified would these protectors of feminine in- 
nocence have been to see the independence and free- 
dom of the young French lycee girl of to-day, as 
she walks or bicycles unchaperoned to school or col- 
lege. 

In the evolution of French girlhood the bicycle's 
role cannot be ignorei^ It has certainly helped to 
untie the family apron-strings. "It is the bicycle," 
writes Mme. Simone Bodeve," "which has educated 
our young people." Elle les a lancees sur la grande 
route, Elle les a grisees de la folie de Vespace. 
Pedalling away on the magic wheel the French 
girl escaped from the supervision of her family, she 
even out-distanced her chaperon. Bowling along 
with her brother and his friends she formed com- 
radeships, which, threatening the time-honoured 
institution of le manage de convenance, are intro- 

^ "I cannot but think," writes William James {Selected 
Papers on Philosophy, p. 25), "that the tennis . . . and the 
bicycle craze, which are so rapidly extending among our dear 
sisters and daughters in this country are going to lead to a 
sounder and heartier moral tone." 

^ Celles qui Travaillent, with an Introduction by Romain 
Rolland, p. l66. 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 231 

ducing into France the Anglo-Saxon mode of early 
engagements and love-marriages. 

Mademoiselle, who had been brought up to re- 
gard a draught as fatal, learned to love fresh air 
and exercise. Her muscles grew supple, her chest 
expanded, swoons and megrims faded into the past. 
Diderot's definition of a woman, as a creature who 
faints at the sight of a mouse or a spider, began to 
sound ridiculous. Rarer and rarer became the 
Lydia Languish type of female, the fragile being 
whom the sentimentalist, Michelet, would raise out 
of the grime and the dust of everyday life on to the 
pedestal of idealism where somehow should be 
handed up to her suaves nourritures qui flattent 
Vodorat autant que le gout. 

It was the bicycle that first began to revolution- 
ise feminine attire. Tight-lacing went out and 
bloomers came in. Then tennis, following the bi- 
cycle, required la jeune fille sportive to don the 
comfortable loose blouse and skirt. Finally, came 
the vogue of the tailor-made, now so indispensable 
an item of a French girl's wardrobe. 

From the l7/ceenne and the hicycliste garconniere 
to the avocate and the doctor esse seemed but a step. 
It was a step, however, which could not be taken 
without a hard struggle against masculine jealousy, 
prejudice, and that ridicule which ever since Mo- 



232 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

Here has clung to la femme savante. Women them- 
selves in this matter were their own worst enemies. 
Even that witty woman, IMme. Emile de Girardin,^ 
was evidently on the side of la petite oie blanche^ for 
she wrote: ''Toutes les fernmes out de V esprit sauf 
les has bleus/' The prejudice against educated 
women was a very old one, older even than Moliere, 
for we find JNIontaigne, who himself liked to talk 
to learned ladies, compelled to admit that he was an 
exception, and that neither Frenchmen nor theolo- 
gians required much learning from women. But 
from Montaigne to la Rochefoucauld and from 
Condorcet to Brieux the cause of woman's educa- 
tion and independence in France has seldom been 
without some among the elite of French manhood 
to champion it. Ah! les braves petites, exclaims 
Romain Rolland as he admires the courage and en- 
ergy with which les vierges guerrieres of 1910 were 
carving out for themselves careers in literature, 
science, and art. 

By that year these warring virgins had already 
won many a hardly contested battle. In 1897, 
women students had been admitted to the Ecole des 

^ Her husband; that king among journalists, Emile de Girar- 
din, was wiser. He supported the cause of woman's independ- 
ence and education (cf. his books, VEgale de VHomme, 
I'Homme et la Femme), and converted so bitter an opponent 
as Alexandre Dumas (flls). 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 233 

Beaux Arts. In 1900, the first woman, Mile. Chau- 
vin, was called to the French Bar, and immediately 
many others began to qualify for that legal profes- 
sion, in which these War years have proved them 
indispensable. More than a score of women bar- 
risters are now practising in Paris, and the barris- 
ter's toque crowning a feminine coiffure is to-day a 
familiar sight in the Palais de Justice. Many years 
earlier French medical faculties had been thrown 
open to women, but until the present century it 
seems to have been chiefly foreign women, English 
and American, who qualified there. By 1907, how- 
ever, there were four hundred and fifty qualified 
women doctors practising up and down France. 
Now that number has considerably increased. Many 
medical women hold government posts, serving as 
inspectresses, officers of health, and so forth. Not 
a few at the beginning of the War were compelled 
to serve as nurses as well as doctors. For it is only 
within the last few years that there has been any 
movement towards the establishment of anything 
resembling the English nursing profession. That 
calling in France had long been regarded as the 
monopoly of nuns and sisters of charity. 

Frenchwomen, unlike their English sisters, have 
always attached more importance to the economic 
than to the political side of their emancipation. One 



234 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

of the earliest manifestoes of modern French fem- 
inism, a petition presented to Louis XVI by women 
of the third estate, on the eve of the Revolution 
(January 1, 1789), begins by renouncing all de- 
sire for political power. "We do not ask, Sire," it 
runs, "for permission to send our deputies to the 
States-General. We know too well that favour 
would control their election, for we realise with 
what ease one may infringe on the liberty of vot- 
ing." 

Then the petitioners proceed to relate the hard- 
ships of woman's lot, whether married or single. 
Many vieilles filles have been driven into convents, 
not constrained by the call of a religious vocation, 
but in order to escape the penury to which, in those 
days before le Code Napoleon, they had been re- 
duced through their parents having expended upon 
the sons the whole of the family fortune. 

As a remedy for their sufferings, the petitioners 
requested that men should be forbidden to exercise 
callings especially suitable for women, that they 
should cease to be dressmakers, embroiderers, mil- 
liners, etc. "If they will leave us the needle and the 
distaff we engage not to usurp the compass and the 
plane." 

Further they implored the king to establish 
feminine occupations of something like the: old craft 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 235 

guilds, to which artificers should only be admitted 
after severe examinations and an inquiry as to mor- 
als. They wished prostitutes to be compelled to 
wear some badge or uniform, in order that they 
might not be mistaken for honest women. 

Further they implored the king to establish 
schools where they might acquire a scientific knowl- 
edge of their language, as well as the principles of 
religion and ethics, divested of all pettiness, and 
where characters might be formed, adorned by such 
virtues as are especially becoming to the feminine 
sex — sweetness, modesty, patience, charity. 

As for the arts, the petitioners continue, women 
will acquire those without a master. Science, they 
add, showing themselves docile to Moliere's influ- 
ence, would but serve to inspire them with foolish 
pride. "It would but make pedants, and, contrary 
to Nature's design, transform us into hybrid crea- 
tures, who are seldom faithful wives, and still more 
seldom good mothers of families." 

"We demand knowledge," they continued, "in 
order to educate our children on reasonable and 
healthy lines and to make them subjects worthy to 
serve you. We shall teach them to cherish the glo- 
rious name of France. We shall inspire them with 
our own love of your Majesty. For while we are 
content to leave genius and valour to men, we shall 



236 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

ever dispute with them the precious gift of sensibil- 
ity. We defy them to love you better than we do. 
They flock to Versailles, most of them for their own 
interests, but we, Sire, in order to see you. When 
after much difficulty, and with a palpitating heart, 
we succeed, if only for an instant, in fixing our gaze 
upon your Illustrious Person, then our tears flow, 
and, oblivious of the idea of majesty and sovereign- 
ty, we only behold in you a tender Father, for whom 
a thousand times we would sacrifice our lives." ^ 

This interesting document strikes the true fem- 
inist note, and, with the exception of its cringing 
royalism and its scorn of science, forecasts the pro- 
gramme of the French Feminist Movement for 
many years to come. 

George Sand, as we have seen, resembled these 
petitioners in her total unconcern about votes for 
women. George Sand's disciple, Mme. Adam (Ju- 
liette Lamber), although a suffragist, in her first 
book, Idees Anti-Prudhoniennes (1858), relegated 
political enfranchisement to the second place. 
*'Work alone," she wrote, *'has emancipated man, 
work alone will emancipate women." Half a cen- 
tury later we find M. Romain Holland regarding 
the woman question as un fait . , , de Vordre econ- 

^ See Considerations sur les Interets du Tiers Etat addres- 
sees au Peuple des Provinces par un Proprietaire Fonder 
(1789). 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 237 

omique, and another writer ^ ascribing the triumph 
of feminism to the bread-and-cheese question, esti- 
mating that, in 1913, out of the nineteen millions of 
Frenchwomen seven millions were earning their 
own living. 

Possibly it was their innate business capacity, 
united to their social success and to the disrepute 
into which politics have fallen in France, that led 
many emancipated Frenchwomen to regard as of 
no account their complete votelessness, their exclu- 
sion both from the local and parliamentary fran- 
chise. 

Nevertheless France, even before the War, was 
not without a women's suffrage movement. In 
1913, the Academy of Political and Moral Science 
offered a prize for the best work on women's suf- 
frage. One or two suffragists had gone so far as 
to refuse to pay taxes. "Why should I, the land- 
owner, pay the land tax when it is only my tenants 
who vote?" protested one of these militants. Out 
of the one hundred and eighty feminist societies 
fifty were suffrage. Some of them, however, num- 
bered but a score or two of members. By far the 
largest and most important, with branches through- 
out the length and breadth of the land, was VUnion 
Franfaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes, presided 

^ Simone Bodeve in Celles qui Travaillent. 



238 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

over by Mme. de Witt Schlumberger. In the Sen- 
ate and the Chamber of Deputies the cause was not 
without supporters. Two of the most enthusiastic 
were M. Jules Siegfried, husband of the president 
of the French National Council of Frenchwomen, 
and M. Ferdinand Buisson, president of the Ligue 
des Droits de VHomme, which also advocates the 
rights of women in Parliament. M. Buisson pre- 
sided over a group formed to promote legislation 
on behalf of women, and, more especially, their en- 
franchisement. 

The War has at length opened the eyes of en- 
lightened French womanhood and of a large num- 
ber of men also to the importance of the vote. For 
the first time in the history of the movement their 
claim to it has been publicly acknowledged in Par- 
liament. At the beginning of the 1918 session, in 
their opening speeches, M. Latapie, the doyen of 
the Senate, and M. Jules Siegfried, the doyen of 
the Chambre des Deputes, proclaimed woman's 
right to parliamentary enfranchisement. 

On the 21st of June, 1918, M. Louis Martin, 
Senator of the Var Department, proposed in the 
Senate, a bill including women over twenty-five in 
the communal electoral lists and in cases of a sena- 
torial election (the French Senate being elected by 
indirect suffrage) enabling municipalities to nom- 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 239 

inate women as members of the electoral college. In 
the following October, however, the parliamentary- 
commission on universal suffrage declared in fa- 
vour of the local government franchise and eligi- 
bility to municipal councils for women over thirty, 
but against the parliamentary vote. 

Many a woman war-worker is now beginning to 
realise how serious are the disabilities her voteless- 
ness imposes upon her. She is also coming to re- 
gard her enfranchisement not as a privilege alone, 
but as a duty to the nation. The founders of the 
first great French Salon, the famous Blue Room, 
used to boast centuries ago that women had debru- 
talised French Society. The president of the 
French Suffrage Union, addressing the annual con- 
gress of her society in 1918, called on women to 
"humanise French politics." She also bade them 
take courage from the thought that outside France 
their demand is now supported by an army of no 
less than twenty-one million women voters. The 
victory of English suffragists has heartened their 
French sisters, whose task, however, is much more 
difficult than was ours. For we must not forget 
that while with us the case of large numbers of dis- 
enfranchised men enforced our demand, in France 
men have already achieved universal suffrage, so 



240 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

that, apart from women, there is no need for any 
extension of the franchise. 

Close are the bonds of sympathy, which in this 
matter, as in so many others, unite America and 
France. L'Union Fran9aise recently sent a depu- 
tation to visit suffrage societies in the United States 
and to report on their methods of organisation. The 
deputation presented a memorial to President Wil- 
son, signed on behalf of all the suffrage societies 
in the Allied Countries, expressing the hope that 
the United States Senate will this session pass the 
Women's Suffrage amendment to the constitution 
which is now before it. In reply the President of 
the American Republic has addressed to all the sig- 
natories of the document an expression of opinion 
so significant that I am glad — through the kindness 
of Mme. de Witt Schlumberger, the president of 
rUnion rran9aise, to be able to reproduce it here — 

"White House, Washington, 

"7 June, 1918. 

"... I have read your message with the deepest 
interest. And with pleasure I take this opportu- 
nity of making unreservedly the following declara- 
tion. The entire reconstruction of the world on a 
democratic basis, for which we are now fighting 
and which we are determined to achieve at any cost, 
can only be completely and satisfactorily attained 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 241 

when women have received the vote. . . . The serv- 
ices they have rendered in this supreme crisis of the 
world's history are most remarkable. Without them 
the War could not have been carried on. Without 
them its sacrifices could not have been borne. It is 
high time that a part of our debt to them should be 
acknowledged and paid. The only acknowledg- 
ment they ask is the vote. Can we with justice re- 
fuse it? 

"WooDRow Wilson." 

At a time when President Wilson is almost idol- 
ised in France, when la Ligue des Droits de 
I'Homme prints on its envelopes a portrait of the 
American President, inscribed with the words, 
Pour la Justice, contre la Barharie, such a pro- 
nouncement, widely circulated as it has been by the 
French Press, cannot fail to strengthen the tend- 
ency, daily increasing, to give women the vote. 
Even in reactionary circles their exclusion from the 
local government franchise is now regarded as a 
gross injustice. 

Suffrage is by no means the only woman's ques- 
tion that the War is revolutionising in France. 
Society's attitude towards woman's lot and woman's 
destiny in general is changing. Before the War, 
despite the educational progress recorded in the 



242 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

foregoing pages, the rank and file of French people 
considered marriage as the one career possible for 
women. They regarded the unmarried woman, 
who remained outside a convent, as a pitiable 
anomaly. "I shall take you to England to learn 
English, for your husbands are being killed at the 
front." These were the words I heard a comfort- 
able Parisian lady addressing to her two little 
granddaughters of nine and eleven. So exhilarat- 
ing did the little girls find the prospect of their 
English travels that the gloom of an unmated fu- 
ture seemed powerless to depress them. I mean- 
while reflected on the social revolution such a re- 
mark portended, nothing more nor less than the 
collapse of the dowry system, that corner-stone of 
French society. For what use would it be now, 
when potential husbands are being killed at the 
front, for French parents in the time-honoured 
manner to begin from the day of their daughter's 
birth to accumulate for her that dowry, without 
which she would be unable to marry? And what 
is to happen to families in the invaded departments? 
They have lost their all. For their daughters, 
dowries as well as husbands are out of the question. 
The disparity in the numbers of the sexes, which 
before the War existed only slightly in France — 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 243 

in 1907 there were 270,000 more women than men^ 
— is now increasing to an enormous extent. The 
destiny of these superfluous women is a question 
pressing for an answer throughout the length and 
breadth of the land. I doubt whether even Catho- 
lics will consider satisfactory an answer recently 
given by a Catholic writer, M. Victor Giraud. M. 
Giraud's solution is the convent; "and the gov- 
ernment," he writes, "will find itself forced to make 
peace with the exiled Orders, to recall them to 
France, and to restore the conventual houses," in 
order that they may receive the feminine blessings 
whom the War will leave unappropriated. To few 
who know anything of the spirit of France to-day 
will such a solution seem likely to be accepted. 

The mass of enlightened French opinion prom- 
ises to deal with the question in a less retrograde 
fashion. Many years before the War, in his vision 
of Europe in the year 2270, Anatole France con- 
ceived the feminine sex as divided into mothers 
and neuters {neutres). The latter he saw capably 
engaging in all kinds of useful activities outside the 
home. "The dreams of philosophers are the facts 
of the future," writes M. France; and already con- 
ditions point to the realisation of the philosopher's 

^ See Charles Turgeon, le Feminisme frangais (1907), Vol. 
I, p. 400. 



244 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

dream in a period much less remote than he fancied. 
Up and down France parents capable of endowing 
their daughters now realise that rather than ac- 
cumulate a hoard to be settled on the girl on a 
wedding-day, which may never arrive, it will be 
better to render her independent, with or without 
marriage, by expending their savings in training 
her for one of those numerous careers which the 
War is opening up to women. 

It is characteristic of French lucidity from the 
Revolution downwards,^ that, among all women's 
questions this matter of training should hold the 
first place. The amateur is tabooed. And the 
methodical thoroughness with which the new 
Frenchwoman seeks to equip herself for her new 
tasks augurs well for the future. It may be illus- 
trated by an incident which occurred in 1917. In 
collaboration with the women's section of our own 
National War Museum Committee, a committee of 
French ladies with title of VEffort Feminin Fran- 
fais pendant la Chierre^ has recently been formed 
to inquire into and record the war-work of their 
compatriots. When, soon after the inauguration of 
this French committee, its members were invited to 
come to England to inspect and report on the war- 

^ See ante, p. 234, for the manifesto of Frenchwomen on 
the eve of the Revolution. 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 245 

work of British women, they gave the character- 
istic reply that they were not yet ready, they must 
render themselves thoroughly conversant with that 
which had been accomplished in their own land be- 
fore they could profit by the experience and achieve- 
ments of other countries. 

In a like spirit of thoroughness are being 
founded, both in Paris and the provinces, numerous 
technical and professional schools for women. A 
few existed before the War, a women's law college 
for example, and some trade schools, including one 
for women printers. 

But to this movement the War has given an im- 
mense impetus. It is revealing a wholesome tend- 
ency to accompany the opening of any new chan- 
nel for women's activity with the foundation of a 
training school for that special department. For 
example, in 1916, a deputation of Frenchwomen 
visited our munition factories, where they were im- 
pressed by the excellent work of our female welfare 
supervisors. Their first step on returning to France 
was to establish a school for the training of such 
workers. This school has now for a year or more 
been sending out, not to munition factories only 
but to various government offices, a band of well- 
equipped women, many of whom have abandoned 



246 THE FRANCE I KNOW 

brilliant professional careers to devote themselves 
to this patriotic work. 

Another instance of the blending of patriotic 
and individualistic motives is presented by the re- 
cent inauguration of la Societe des Educatrices 
FrancO'Anglaises, designed to equip women for the 
teaching of French and the explanation of the 
French point of view in England. 

Our Allies now realise that the inferiority of the 
type of person who crossed the Channel to teach 
French in this Island was partly responsible for 
the failure of the two races to understand one an- 
other, and that it had driven many of the best 
English schools to confide instruction in French 
to English, Swiss, Belgian — or, in some cases, even 
German — teachers. To-day these Anglo-French 
governesses are being instructed not only in the 
latest methods of teaching, but in British literature 
and in British points of view. The society has also 
established an employment bureau. 

The important question of woman's wages the 
War is also bringing to the fore. In France they 
have been even more grossly inadequate than in this 
country. In 1915 a law was passed, instituting 
something very like our trade boards to regulate 
wages in industries carried on at home. 

In the dressmaking and millinery trades before 



THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 247 

the War, apprentices received fivepence a day, 
the majority of other employees from two shillings 
and fivepence to three shillings and sevenpence. 
]Mme. Paquin has stated the maximum wage to be 
seven shillings. But no one ever heard of an em- 
ployee who earned that sum. The famous midinette 
strike of 1917 arose from the fact that these wages 
were still being paid, though the cost of living had 
doubled. The employers consented to a rise of one 
franc all round. In September, 1918, prices having 
continued to rise to such an extent that nuts — an 
important item in the midinette's menu — cost two- 
pence halfpenny each, a further increase of wages 
was demanded; and its refusal has led to another 
strike.^ 

Women are permitted to join certain of the men's 
syndicates — that of the elementary teachers, for 
example — as well as the syndicates of hatmakers, 
coachbuilders, and aeroplane manufacturers. There 
have also ever since 1884, when the law was passed 
authorising the formation of syndicates, been those 
which comprise women only. And in the general 
syndicalist movement, as recent conferences in 
Paris prove, women are playing a prominent part. 

In every direction, therefore, we may descry the 

^See ''Manchester Guardian," September 27, 1918, The 
Paris Midinettes. 



248 



THE FRANCE I KNOW 



dawn of a classic age of womanhood. The French- 
woman's natural ability, enhanced by technical 
training and the widening of her mental horizon, is 
fitting her to collaborate with her fellow-country- 
men in the most stupendous task of national re- 
building Humanity has ever been called upon to 
accomplish. 



INDEX 



Academy, French, 175 

Anatole France at a meeting 

of, 35 
Acker, novelist, 51 
Action Fran9aise, la Ligue de 1', 

149 
newspaper, 30, 97, 126, 131, 

154 

royalist society, 129 

Adam, Mme., 9, 10, 19, 189, 236 

Agadir, affair of, 28, 37 

Ailette, valley of the, 70 

Aisne, the, 64, 69 

Aix, 151 

Alcoholism, 161, 162 

Algeciras, Council of, 37 

Allen, Mr. Warner, 70 

Ambrine, 75, 220 

Amiens, 48, 146 

Amsterdam, sociahst congress at, 

123 
Andler, Professor Charles, 97 
Angelo, Michael, 132, 133 
Anglo-Saxon, 2, 6, 117, 153, 220, 

231 
Anglo-Saxons, 9 
Annales, I'Universite des, 163 
Anti-militarism, 29, 302 
Antionette, Queen Marie, 220 
Antwerp, 66 
Arc, Joan of, 13, 16, 22, 117, 118, 

131. See also Jeanne d'Arc. 
Argonne, 19 
Ariosto, 133 
Aristotle, 188 
Arnold, Matthew, 178, 179 
Arras, 64, 80 
Asquith, Mr., 73 
Atherton, Mrs. Gertrude, 226 
Atlantic, the, 151 



Augagneur, 124 

Augustines, English, the convent 
or, 187 

Bacon, 188 

Balzac, Honors de, 159 

Barbes, 196 

Barbusse, Henri, 101, 111, 113, 

114 
Barr^s, Maurice, ISn., 31, 32, 35, 

101, 110, 138, 142, 148, 208, 211 

President of the League of 

Patriots, 26, 122, 126 

Bartet, Mme., 220 
Barthou, 127 
Bastille, the Fall of, 44 
Bazin, Rene, 5, 35, 101, 158 

articles on depopulation, 

164 n. 1 

Beauquier, 138 

Beauvais, 48 

Beaux Arts, Ecole des, 232, 233 

Bebel, Augustus, 175 

Bellay, Joachim du, 17 

Benda, Julien, 51, 115 and n. 3 

Benjamin, Rene, 101 

Bentham, Jeremy, 23 

Beranger, 188 

Bergson, Henri, 115 

Berre, I'Etang de, 149, 150 

Berry, 186 

Bert, Paul, 139 

"Bertha," 73, 77, 145 

Bertrand, Louis, 101 

Bethincourt, 91 

Bismarck, 27. 28 

Blanc, Louis, 196 

Bloc, le, 124 

Boche, the, 19, 69, 81, 87, 93, 131 

Bod^ve, Mme. Simone, 230, 237 ». 



249 



250 



INDEX 



Bodley, Mr. J. E. C, 4 
Boloism, 73 
Bolsheviks, 131 
Bonaparte, Louis, 197 
Boni, Giacomo, 41 
Bon Marche, the, 50, 63 
Bordeaux, 151 

Henri, 35, 101 

Bosnia, Austria's Annexation of, 

37 
Bossuet, 175, 188 
Bouilloux La font, 160 
Boulangist, 25 
Boulenger, 101 
Boulogne-sur-Mer, 48 
Bourbon, Palais, 118 
Bourgeois, Leon, 125, 164, 165, 

168" 
Bourges, 186 

Michel de, 194 

Bourget, Paul, 35, 101 
Bousquet-I^evVj trial of, 128 
Bowdler, Mr/, 6 

Bovlesve, Rene, 101, 107, 108, 

109, 111, 214 n. 
Braz, Anatole le, 149 
Briand, Aristide, 85, 124, 128, 129 
Brieux, 232 
Britling, Mr., 99, 100 
Brittany, 149 

Bronte, Charlotte, 180 and 7^. 
Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 183 and 

n. 2, 192 v., 205 
Brunswick, 20 
Buisson, M. Ferdinand, 98, 126, 

140, 141, 142, 1C6, 238 
Buonaparte, General, 13 

Cachin, Marcol, 120, 167 

Cahiers de la Quinzaine, period- 
ical, 51 

Camelot, 71 

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henrj^ 
37 n. 

Canada, 2 

Capucines, boulevard des, 49 

Capus, Alfred, 29, 115 n. 3 

Carlyle, Thomas, 23, 101, ICO 

Carrel, Dr., 75 

Cavell, Nurse, 94 



Cevennes, the, 5 

Champigny, battlefield of, 55, 

208 
Champs filysdes, 7, 227 
Chapelain, 20 
Character, French national, 1, 2, 

3, 7, 8, 9, 13, 113, 117, 118 
Charles VII, King of France, 

16, 17 
Chartier, Jean, 16 
Chauvin, Mile., 223 
Clemenceau, M., 33, 37 n., 76, 

77, 122, 127 w., 138, 139 

and the Society of Nations, 

168 

becomes Prime Minister, 

(1917), 76 

Clootz, Baron, 23 

Coalition Republicaine, 124 

Coburg, 22 

Code Napoleon, 159, 174, 175, 
176, 177 

Colonial Empire, French, 28 

Combes, Emile, 27, 31, 33 

Command, unity of, 146 

Compain, Mme.' Louise, 221, 222 

Compieene, 75 

Conde, \he Great, 13 

Condiliac, 188 

Condorcet, 232 

Confederation Generalf^'dni Tra- 
vail, 123, 124, 144 

Congo, French, 28 

Conseils Generaux, 152 

Constant, Baron d'Estournelles 
de, 29, 32, 126, 127 

Convenience, marriage of, 170, 
228, 230 

Copernicus, 133 

Corneille, 20 

Coucy, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72 

Douaumont, 91 

Dumas, Alexandre (jVs), 170, 171 

Duvernet, Michel, 195 

Ebray, M. Alcide, 11 
"Echo de Paris," newspaper, 126 
Educatrices franco-anglaises, So- 
ciete des, 246 



INDEX 



251 



Edward VII, King, 37 ». 
Ellis, Havelock, 163 
Enseignement, Ligiie de V, 140 
Entente, Franco-British, 94 

Triple, 98 

Epinay, Mrae. d', 185 
Erasmus, 133 
Esperanto, 88 
Eugenie, Empress, 86 

Faguet, M. Emile, 11 

Family, the French, 5, 6, 18, 170, 
171, 172 

Favre, Jules, 24 

Federalism, economic, 152, 153 

Federation, fete of, 24 

Feminism. See Sand, George. 

Feminist, 176, 177, 220, 236 

Femmes Franqaises, Conseil Na- 
tional des, 220, 237 

Fiesole, 88 

"Figaro, le," newspaper, 29, 126 

Flaubert, 100 

Florence, 88 

Foch, Marshal, 14 

Fontaine, Charles, 17 

Fontainebleau, 78 

Fourvieres, 87, 88 

France, Anatole, 16, 29, 51, 73, 
100, 112, 113, 121, 137, 208, 
214,- 2'' 3 

War in the writings of, 35- 

47 

Francueil, M. Dupin de, 185 

Mme. Dupin de, 185 and n. 

Frankfort, Treaty of, 157 
Frederick Augustus II, Elector 

of Saxony, 185 and n. 
Freycinet, M. de, 33 

Galileo, 133 
Galileos, 133 
Gambetta, 14, 137, 139 
Gascony, 151 

"Gaulois, le," newspaper, 126 
Gautier, Theophile, 18, 19 
Genesis, book of, 175 
G^raldy, 101 and n. 2, 214 n. 
Gerard, M. Auguste, 98 
Gerb^viller, 214 



Gervais, Saint, church of, 77 
Girardin, Emile de, 232 n. 

Mme. Emile de, 232 

Giraud, Victor, 7 n., 139, 162, 

243 
Girondin, 20 
Goffic, Le, 148 

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 3, 96, 178 
Gourmont, Remy de, 30, 32 
Grande Siecle, le, 14 
Grey, Sir Edward, now Viscount, 

37 7t. 
"Guerre Sociale," newspaper, 30 
Guesde, Jules, 128 
Guizot, 6, 154 
Guyot, Yves, 126 

Hague, the, 29, 127 

Halevy, Daniel, 26 

Halevys, the, 51 

Hamerton, Gilbert, 4, 17 

Hanotaux, Gabriel, 164, 208 

Hearne, Mrs. Walter, 81 

Henessy, M. Jean, 149, 152 

Henri Quatre, 13 

Henriot, 77 

Hermant, Abel, 100 

Herriot, Edouard, 84, 86, 90, 91 n., 
144, 157, 162 

Herve, Gustav, 30, 31, 32, 127 

Herzegovina, Austria's annexa- 
tion of, 37 

Hobbes, John Oliver, 207 

"Homme Libre, 1'," newspaper, 
127 n. 

Honfleur, 148 

Hugo, Victor, 79, 100, 169, 177 

"Humanite, 1','' newspaper, 121, 
127, 167 

Indre, River, 186 
"Intransigeant, 1'," newspaper, 

62 
Iser, the, 66, 67 
Issy-le-Moulineauv, 74, 220 

Jaloux, 101 
James, Henry, 75 
William, 230 n^ 1 



252 



INDEX 



Jaures, Jean, 1, 29, 34, 124, 125, 

127, 128 
Jeanne d'Arc, 136 

cult of, 208-213 

Vie de, 16 and n., 37, 38, 

121. See also Arc, Joan of. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 22 
Joffre, Marshal, 64 

i:cole at Lyons, 87 

Jouhaux, 123, 144 
"Journal Officiel, le," 147 
Julie, Soeur, 215 
Junkers, 43 

Justice, Palais de, 233 

Kerensky, 121 
Kienthal, 120 
Kienthaliens, 121 
Kipling, Rudyard, 211 
Kitchener, Lord, 94 
Klopstock, 23 
Koechlin, Mme., 221 
Kultur, 10 

Lab6, Louise, 85 n. 

Lacordaire, 180 

Lamartine, 180 

Lamennais, 180, 203 

Lamy, Etienne, 175 

Languedoc, 149, 151 

La Rachais, 88 

Larbaud, Valery, 101 

La Rochefoucauld, 232 

Latapie, M., 238 

Laurent, Dr., 75 

Leibnitz, 188 

Leipzig, fair at, 90, 91 

Lemaitre, Jules, 99 

Le Play, 158 and n. 

Leroux, 180, 194 

Levasseur, 120 

Leygues, M., 77 

Lichtenberger, Andre, novelist, 

51 
Ligues des Droits de I' Homme et 

dme Citoyen, 126, 238, 241 
Limoges, 123 
Littre, 122, 123 
Lloyd George, Mr., 73 
Locke, 188 



Loisy, M. Alfred, 15, 135 n. 136, 

137 
Lounguet, 120, 121 
Lorraine, 148, 153 
Louis XIV, King of France, 158 
Louis XVI, King of France, 185 

and n., 234 
Louis le Debonnaire, King of 

France, 157 
Louvre, Mhgasin dm, 50 
Lu^on, Cardinal Bishop of, 138, 

139 
Luther, 132 
Luthers, the, 133 
Luxembourg Gardens, 7 
Lyons, arsenal of war, 85 

British mayors at, 86 

Congres du Livre at, 96 

German prison camp at, 92, 

93 

Great Fair of, 90, 91, 96 

M. Herriot, mayor of, 84, 85 

re-education of wounded at, 

87, 88, 89, 90 

Macaigne, M. Andre, 99 
Macherez, Mme., 215 
Maeterlinck, 112 
Malesherbes, boulevard, 63 
Malvy, trial of, 123 
Marbro, Camille, 101, 103 
Marceau, 13 
Marechal de Saxe, Maurice, 185 

and n. 
Margueritte, the brothers, 100 
Marienbad, 37 n. 
Marne, the banks of, 54, 55, 64 

battle of, 12, 52, 57, Q5, 80 

after the first battle of, 48- 

53 

Marseilles, 151 

Mater, M. Andre, 98, 99 

Maubeuge, 69 

Maurras, Charles, 30, 97, 131, 

142, 149 
Mazzini, 198 
Mediterranean, the, 151 
Meredith, George, 172 
Metin, Albert, 99 
Meurthe-et-Moselle, 90 



INDEX 



253 



Meyran, Camille, 101 
Michelet, Jules, 172, 174, 231 
Midinettes, 50, 222, 223, 224, 225, 

247 
Millerand, 124 
Millet, 83 
Mistral, 149 

Molifere, 6, 229, 232, 2S5 
Monod, Gabriel, 88 

Mme., 88 

Mons, retreat from, 69, 70 

Montaigne, 62, 133, 232 

Montesquieu, 188 

Montmartre, 76 

Montparnasse, 73 

Montpelier, 151 

Morcellement, 159 

Morley, Lord, 111, 112, 178, 179 

Morocco, 28, 90 

Murray, Professor Gilbert, 110 «. 

Myers, W. H., 178, 179, 193 

Napoleon I, 24, 175 
Napoleon III, 86 
Naquet's law, 177, 228 
Nations, League of, 41, 125 
Societe des, 98 

Society of, 98, 165, 166, 167, 

168, 169 

Niel, Marshal, 24 

Nohant, 186, 187, 188, 191, 193, 

194 
Norman, Captain Sir Henry, 

M.P., 89 n. 
Normandy, 158 

Od^on, theatre, 53 
(Edipe, tragedy, 20 
Ohnet, Georges, 12 and n. 
Orleans, le Due d', 130 
Ostrorog, Count L6on, 98 iu 
Ourcq, victory of, 13 

Pacifist, 29 
Paine, Tom, 23 
Palais, le Grand, 75 

Royal, 49 

Pan-Germans, 10 
Pantheon, 49 
Paquin, Mme., 174 



Pare Monceau, 7 
Parcellement, 160 
Paris, la Revue de, 191 

le Comte de, 130 

Pascal, 188 

"Patrie, la," newspaper, 62 
Patriotism, cosmopolitan, 15, 16, 
23, 24, 25, 33, 34 

nationalist, 15, 22, 23, 24, 

25, 28, 33, 34 

— — of Frenchwomen, 213, 214 
227 

passionate, 171 

real and unreal, 15 

Patriots, League of, 25, 26, 32, 

122, 126, 212 
Peguy, Charles, 1, 26, 51, 52 
Pepins, the, 157 
Pericles, 142 
Pervyse, Q6 
Petain, General, 64 
Piccadilly, 3 
Pitt, 22 
Plato, 142, 206 
Poilu, 63, 64, 74, 134 
PoincarS, Mme., 10 
"Press, la," newspaper, 62 
Prevost, Marcel, novelist, 35, 

100 
Printemps, Magasin du, 50, 63 
Proud'hon, 39 
Provence, 5, 151 

Raphael, 132 

Raphaels, 133 

R^camier, Mme., 85 

"Regional," 152 

"Regionalism," 148, 149 and n. 1 

"Regionalist," 149 

Reinach, Joseph, 32 

Renan, Ernest, 11, 99, 113, 132, 

133 n. 1, 228 
Representation Professionelle, 

Ligue de, 149 
Revanchard, 24, 32 
Revanche, la, 24, 30 
Revival, Catholic, 27, 133, 135 
"Revue, la Grande," 216 
Rheims, 80, 210 
Rhine, Passage of, 55 



254 



INDEX 



Rhone, the, 90, 93, 151 

Ribot, 164., 165 

Rights of Man, League of, 98 

Rivoli, Place de, 210 

RoUand, Ronaam, 51, 230 and ». 

2, 232, 236 
Romde, Isabelle, 16 
Roseberv* Lord, 150 
Rosny (ajW), J. H., 100, 103, 

106, 107 
Roubaix, 92 
Rouen, 210, 211 
Rougon Macquart, 9 
Rousseau, 186 
Rudler, Professor G., 3 n. 

Said, Villa, 39, 40 
Saint-Antoine, faubourg de, 44 
Saint Cloud, 182 
Saint Jacques, rue de, 49 
Saint Michel, boulevard, 96 
Saint Simonians, 202 
Sainte-Beuve, 178, 184, 188, 192, 

199 
Saints Peres, rue des, 221 
Samaritaine, la Grande, 174 
Sand, George, allegorical manner 

of, 182 

and the Commune, 199 

and the war of 1870, 198 

apostle of solidarity, 184 

contemporaries of, 180 

critics of, 178, 180, 190 

descent of, 184, 185 and n. 

events in life of, 184-192 

feminism of, 199-203 

genius of, 178 

idealising method of, 183 

letters of, 181, 203, 204, 205, 

206 

literary life, periods of, 184 

marriage of, 190 

old age of, 206, 207 

personal appearance of, 186 

personal manner of, 186 

prose of, 178, 179 

reading of, 188 

realism of, 183, 205 

republicanism of, 195, 196, 

197, 198 



separation from husband, 

190 

works of, 178, 179, 191, 192, 

193 

Sandar, agricultural college at, 
89 

Sandeau, Jules, 191 

Sanfort, Dr. Barthe de, 74, 220 

Sansctilotte, 22 

Saone, the, 90 

Sappho, 179 

Sembat, Marcel, 33, 138, 221 

Shakespeare, 6, 133 n. 1 

Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 18 

"Siamese grafting," surgical op- 
eration of, 75 and n. 

Siegfried, Jules, 238 

Mme., 220 

Socialists, independent, 120, 123, 
128 

radical, 124 

unified, 120, 123 

SocUtes, OuvrUres, F^diration 

de, 123 
Soissons, battle of, 57 

Mme. Macherez saves, from 

destruction, 215 

Soissons, retaking of, 14 

Sonolet, Louis, novelist, 101 

Sorbonne, rue de la, 51 

Sorel, Georges, 128 

Souday, Paul, 109 

Steed, Henry Wickham, 37 n. 

Stern, Daniel, Comtesse d'Agoult, 
200 

Sufrage des Femmes, Union 
Francaise pour le, 237, 238, 
239 

Syndicalism, 92, 123 

Syndicalist, 29, 30, 120, 122, 123, 
124, 127, 128, 129, 247 

"Syndicaliste, la Bataille," news- 
paper, 123 

"Tageblatt, the Berliner," news- 
paper, 12 
Taine, Hippolyte, 101, 178, 184 
Tangier, affair of, 28 
Tardiveau. See Boylesve, Ren6. 
"Temps, le," newspaper, 126 



INDEX 



255 



Thackeray, 178 

Tharaud, the brothers, novelists, 
51, 100 

Theatre Fran^ais, le, 156 

Thomas, Albert, 121, 125, 151, 
155, 164 

enters Coalition Ministry 

(1916), 33 

Tinayre, Mme. Marcelle, 84, 100 

Tocqueville, de, 186 

Tolstoy, 24 

Toulouse, 151 

Touraine, 158 

Tourvielle, school for re-educat- 
ing crippled soldiers at, 87, 88, 
89 

Trianon, 182 

Tricoteuses, 20 

Tuberculosis, 161 

Tunis, 28 

Ulbach, Louis, 203 
Uz^s, la Duchesse d', donaridre, 
10 

Yaillant, Edouard, socialist lead- 
er, 32, 142 
Vaugeois, Henri, 131 
Vauvenargues, 111 n. 
Vaux, 91 



Venddme, Place, 77 
Verdun, defence of, 91 
Verri^res, Mile, de, 185 
Versailles, 39, 182, 236 
"Victoire, la," newspaper, 12T 
Villeroy, 52 
Viollet-le-Duc, 68 
Voltaire, 23, 113, 137 
Vosges, gap in the, 31 

Watteau, 56 

Maison de, 54 

Webb, Sidney, 99 

Weil, Commandant, 97 

Wells, ri. G., 100, 107 

West, Rebeca, 104 

Westermarck, 16 

Westminster Cathedral, 130 

William II, Emperor of Ger- 
many, 27, 28 

Wilson, Woodrow, President, 
240, 241 

Witt-Schlumberger, Mme. de, 
220, 238, 240 

Yarde-BuUer, Mrs. Henry, 81 

Ypres, 64 

Zola, 8, 9 



